Setting health priorities: community boards accurately reflect the preferences of the community's residents.

Setting priorities remains an important part of healthcare planning and program management. Local community input is often sought in government or publicly sponsored programs. Community policy/advisory boards are a common vehicle to represent the community's interests in program decisions and direction. Questions remain whether community boards accurately represent their communities' views. As part of a planning effort within Chicago and Cook County, Illinois, local District Health Councils (DHCs) have been created to provide assistance and leadership in systemization and improvement of the healthcare in communities with the poorest health status in the region. We sought to discover how closely the perceptions of health priorities of DHC members agreed with those of community members. A structured five-point Likert scale questionnaire of 22 of the most common diseases and conditions known to impact health were used for a random digit dialing telephone interview with a sample of 286 households from three under-served communities. The same interview was repeated with all DHC members (n = 80) representing those communities. Sociodemographic profiles and health-related behaviors were also collected. The results of this interview indicate a close and substantial agreement in priorities between community members and DHC members. Psychosocial conditions such as violence and substance abuse were ranked as the highest priorities by both groups. In contrast, sociodemographics and healthcare behavior differed significantly between DHC members and community's residents. This study demonstrates that these community policy/advisory boards can closely reflect the views of the communities they represent. Attention to their differences in sociodemographics and healthcare experiences with the community may strengthen their role even more.