Our Community

Executive Summary: Reaching Out to Our Community

In order to be truly effective in our mission to care for our entire community, we know that we must extend our efforts beyond the four walls of our buildings. We take specific steps to gain an understanding of our community's most pressing health care needs, and we make plans and take action to address those needs.

In turn, we work with community partners who use their talents and resources to multiply the effectiveness of our contributions toward caring for the residents of the cities we serve. We value the collaborative relationships we share with local businesses, civic and non-profit organizations, service clubs and individuals. Working together, we are more effective than we could ever be on our own.

A few examples of the ways in which we interact with our community:

• Every three years, we conduct a community health needs assessment, which helps us to determine the most pressing health needs of the people we serve. From there, we create a community benefit plan that details the steps we will take to address unmet needs. The top issues from our 2010 assessment include high cholesterol, heart disease, asthma, tuberculosis, flu vaccination, obesity, tobacco use, mental illness and homelessness.
• In order to assure access to essential health care services to everyone in our community, we provide free and low-cost care to financially needy patients, often working with other organizations to secure funding for this care. We also provide charity care to patients who are uninsured or underinsured.
• Recognizing that prevention and early detection are key to a healthy community, we offer a number of sources for education and screening. These include screenings at hospital and community events; classes on first aid, CPR, childbirth, baby care and other topics; hospital- and community-based support groups; publication of a quarterly community magazine; and physician-led health lectures at various venues throughout the community.
• We encourage our employees to volunteer in the community. Our Scrubs program compensates employees for one shift per year when they volunteer at select organizations in Simi Valley and Moorpark. In addition, many of our department directors and managers, as well as other leaders, volunteer on community boards of directors and/or key committees.