Johnson County Public Health received a $125,000 grant earlier this month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to address health care access and education in the county.

The grant is from the CDC’s Closing the Gap With Social Determinants of Health Accelerator Plan.

Lisa Parlato, Johnson County Public Health chronic disease prevention specialist, said there are social determinants of health that are broken up into five domains: Health care access and quality, neighborhood of built environment, social and community context, economic stability, and education access and quality.

“Within those five domains, there are specific aspects of conditions of your environment that affect your health in ways that aren’t necessarily direct or things that you wouldn’t immediately think of as affecting your health,” Parlato said.

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Sam Jarvis, Johnson County Public Health community health division manager, said the grant is designed to help the county set up ways to help social determinants.

“The grant is a one-year funding opportunity, really to create an implementation plan and look at developing a strategy that would be shovel-ready to address the social determinants of health in a variety of different ways,” Jarvis said.

Johnson County Public Health outlined in the news release that it has “proposed the creation of a leadership team of community stakeholders to form a plan for community health workers to help address chronic disease in underserved populations within the county.”

This team, Shannon said, will be made up of people in the county who represent different parts of the community.

“We have people who work with immigrant and refugee populations. We have community engagement from the public library, from social services in the area from providers in the area, especially ones who are particularly interested in addressing the social determinants of health and addressing those disparities,” she said.

According to an Oct. 12 news release, the county plans to use the funding to “accelerate public health strategies and actions that reduce the burden of chronic disease among people experiencing health disparities and inequities.”

Karrey Shannon, Johnson County Public Health a community health nurse, said the county applied for the grant in June after the need to help social determinants of health became apparent.

“We worked really hard to collect information about our different communities within Johnson County to make a good case for why community health workers would be a really excellent choice for helping supplement providers and health care and other social services efforts within the county,” Shannon said.