About Reaching for Excellence
"Reaching for Excellence: Community Vision and Voices for Western New York Health Care" seeks to engage Western New Yorkers in exploring possibilities and setting goals for a stronger, improved health care system for the eight-county region.
Sponsored by the Community Health Foundation of Western & Central New York and The John R. Oishei Foundation, in partnership with the P2 Collaborative of Western New York and the University at Buffalo Regional Institute, the initiative seeks to fill a gap in the region in meaningful community-driven health planning and civic engagement by providing a clear mechanism to gather, coordinate and amplify the voice of the user in setting a long-term health care vision. The project's goals are to 1) promote broader, informed civic engagement in our communities on matters of health and health care; 2) give voice on health care priorities to those who use and those who pay for health care; 3) define a people-driven set of priorities which can be tracked to measure progress toward the desired goals; and 4) learn lessons from other places about ways to improve our health care system. Toward that end, the Reaching for Excellence initiative is organized around three components:
- a Speaker Series showcasing national best practices and models of excellence in areas of health care challenging Western New York;
- One Friday: Four Futures, a series of commuity conversations designed to amplify the voice of all in Western New York – the users of the health care system – in answering the question, “What do we want the future of health care in Western New York to look like?”, and
- distilling health care priorities and goals for the region from community feedback, which will drive key indicators of health care system performance for regular monitoring and reporting.
The Speaker Series commenced in November 2007, while One Friday: Four Futures launched in January 2008. Feedback from both components will lay the foundation for the community-driven health care priorities and indicators to be developed by spring 2009.
Context for Action: Several factors position the region for fundamental change in its health care system. These include rising health care costs; mandated reconfiguration of our hospitals and nursing homes; a rapidly aging population with increasing health needs; a poorly defined safety net in both urban and rural areas; a looming crisis in health workforce shortages, including physicians and nurses; the need for significant investment in health-related information technology; and an increasing reliance on the medical and health science industry as a major economic engine for our region. At the same time, the region has an increasing number of organizations and people committed to a stronger community voice in health care investment decisions.
