Working Together to Improve Health Care in Dayton, OH

Dayton Children’s Hospital

Improving the health of an entire community isn’t something one organization can do on its own, and Dayton is fertile ground for innovative collaborations among forward-thinking partners in health care. Here’s a look at the collaborations powering health care in Dayton and the surrounding communities.

Shared Action Around the Dayton Region

The Greater Dayton Area Hospital Association (GDAHA) focuses on partnerships to improve community health. GDAHA’s 29 hospital and health system members serve more than 11 counties in the Dayton area.

“Our members collaborate in areas like behavioral health and maternal and infant health and vitality,” says Sarah Hackenbracht, president and CEO. “We’re asking, ‘How can we better serve our communities? How can we better address some of these really challenging needs that no one partner can solve for everyone in our region?’”

GDAHA works to convene and facilitate conversations. 

“It’s about getting to a point of shared action,” Hackenbracht says, “taking everyone through planning processes to determine the top actions we can take collectively, and then being engaged in implementing community change.

“This entire community – health care providers, the business community, education partners and local jurisdictions – we’re all ensuring we are creating a community that people choose to be a part of,” she says. “Our health care organizations are a critical component of that. We need local health care services that are high quality and affordable. And for the workforce, these are also some of the best and most stable positions in the local economy.”

GDAHA, along with Premier Health, Kettering Health and Dayton Children’s Hospital, also collaborated to form Ascend Innovations in 2015. Much of that work is focused on community health initiatives, helping organizations be ready to use data to guide decisions. 

Dayton Children’s Hospital

Big Ideas for Health Care in Dayton

Robbie Brandon’s work underscores the value of creative partnerships. Brandon’s nursing career began more than 30 years ago at Dayton Children’s Hospital, where she discovered a passion for mental health care and its importance to the community. 

“The brain is the most important organ in the body,” she says. “It runs everything, and if it’s not well, nothing else is going to be well.”

Recognizing a need, Brandon rallied friends and colleagues to found Sunlight Village, a faith-based nonprofit organization for which she serves as CEO. Sunlight Village today is a vibrant hub for children and youth in its West Dayton neighborhood. Among many services, it offers participants a safe place after school with educational programming and leadership training, helping prepare them for future success. 

Now, one of Brandon’s initiatives – the Healthy Family Market – has brought her full circle, providing Sunlight Village an opportunity to work with Dayton Children’s Hospital and other organizations to improve community health. 

“This will be a pharmacy-style market,” Brandon says. “Our initial idea was to help low-income families in the community gain access to healthy foods and produce, along with a coffee bar and smoothie shop. And now, we have this amazing partnership with Dayton Children’s Hospital, which has grown the project 100-fold,” she says of the $8 million project now in the works.

Intentional Work

That project, which includes support from CityWide Development Corp., Greater Dayton Premier Management and other partners, will now include an urgent care center operated by Dayton Children’s Hospital in space adjacent to the newly developed market. 

“Robbie has been such a great partner for us because she’s so familiar with and trusted by her community,” says Jessica Salem, executive director of the Center for Health Equity at Dayton Children’s Hospital. “We know, as a hospital, that we don’t have all the answers for neighborhoods. We don’t fully understand what the barriers may be for someone to access health care.”

Salem says partnerships like this are key to taking on big, challenging issues. 

“Our hospital has made an important commitment to do this work in partnership. In this case, we learned from talking to families that they might have access to primary care, but it might not be at times they need. So, the acute care model seemed to be the most important service to put in this location.”

Dayton Children’s is working to build additional relationships with neighborhood associations, churches and schools. 

“This is really critical before we even open the new building,” Salem says. “It’s going to be a beautiful space. It’s easy to co-locate with partners, but it’s a lot harder to integrate services. So, there’s this intentional conversation about, ‘How does this look different?’ It’s not about us sharing a building, but how do we actually share the work?”