Black health survey launches in Frederick County

FREDERICK COUNTY, Md. ( DC News Now ) — The Black Health Equity Coalition is asking the Black community to participate in a health survey – and this year, the coalition received a grant to help fix problems mentioned by participants.

Dr. Denis Rollins is the Executive Director for the Black Health Equity Coalition. She said in past years, health surveys have been done in the county, but none have focused on Black health.

“If we bring our forces together collectively and expand that we not only help individuals in the community, we help our organizations and we help the community as a whole,” Dr. Rollins said.

“This time, we want to get as many as 4,000 Black people in Frederick and say to them, How are you feeling, What’s your health like, and not just your physical health, your mental health, your spiritual health, your financial health, your residential health,” Dr. Rollins explained.

Community members like Kyeonia Gregory, who has lived in Frederick County for over 20 years, say one of the biggest disparities in the Black community is knowledge of local resources.

“Just talking about Black health in general, the resources out there aren’t known,” Gregory said. “So just having that awareness growing up, it wasn’t really there. Even my primary care doctors, they weren’t really tending to me specifically with the things and issues that I had.”

With the grant, the coalition will take the problems expressed in the survey and provide solutions.

“We are using our eyes towards coalition building, that means having dedicated employees who are working on this and moving this forward, it means administering the survey the first time we’ve ever done something at this scale,” Dr. Rollins said. “It also means putting together lists of resources.”

The survey will be open until Sept. 15.

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