Capacity and trust issues can make it difficult for health and social service agencies to gather the feedback they need to improve their services.

Health and social service agencies can have limited capacity to collect and respond to client feedback. This limitation may be due to a lack of institutionalized mechanisms for clients to provide feedback, community mistrust that feedback will be well received, or both.

Jackson Care Hub aims to address this issue by designing a communication hub to serve as a trusted community resource for relaying information on client experiences back to health and social service agencies. The long-term goal is that hub will enable Jackson residents to relay their feedback on care delivery to a trusted community partner, so that Jackson Care Hub can, in turn, translate community feedback into actionable steps for health and social service agencies to improve care.

NORC will facilitate a strategic planning process to establish a trusted health and social services communications hub for residents of Jackson, Michigan.

NORC is working alongside Jackson Care Hub to conduct a landscape analysis of the health and social services environment in Jackson, Michigan. This landscape analysis will assess local organizations’ capacity and readiness to serve as a communication hub for client experiences within community health and social service agencies and evaluate the community’s appetite for this communications hub. We will use key interest interviews and focus groups to understand the perspectives of community leaders and residents of Jackson. Our findings will provide the foundation for Jackson Care Hub’s strategic plan to develop a trusted communications resource for Jackson residents. By grounding our efforts in a co-created, community-engaged process, we will ensure that the voices of those who will benefit from this new communication hub inform its creation.