MARQUETTE, Mich. (WZMQ) – The U.P. Health System held the 2025 Community Health Summit this morning, covering the Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) survey. Every three years, this survey welcomes community members and organizations to provide input on what they believe to be the most important health needs for Marquette County.
U.P. Health System Tonya Darner says that these summits brings a great amount of diversity into the inputs they gather.
“It wasn’t just healthcare, it was behavioral health, it was from our Northern Michigan University partners, it was our behavioral health partners, it was our non-profit partners,” said Darner. “So it was good to see the diversity that was in the group of people that volunteered to come in and talk through the survey results to determine how we can meet the needs of Marquette County.”
During the half-day consensus-building session, CHNA survey results that had been gathered over the last few months, were shared at the summit to the more than 60 people in attendance. With these results, the top three most significant needs were taken into consideration to create plans for how they can be improved.
Darner continued, “We took the information from the survey results, then we did breakout sessions to determine, ‘what should we be focusing on as a community and as a health system moving forward?'”
The goal of the summit is for the U.P. Health System to be able to break away from making its own assumptions for what the community needs.
“It allows us to make the right decisions,” said Darner. “So we’re not making decisions on what we’re assuming the needs of the population in the community is, we’re actually hearing from them, and then taking that information and putting it into action.”
Results from the summit will go through a final report, to be later released in May.
For more information on the assessment, visit uphealthsystem.com.
