What exactly is Celebrating Healthy West Virginia?
CHWV is a useful process and tool for assessing health and quality of life markers in West Virginia's communities.
Since 2019, Celebrating Healthy West Virginia (CHWV) has been helping communities become more attractive, healthy, and resilient. A program from the West Virginia Division of Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention, CHWV provides communities of any size an effective framework to see their community through priority quality-of-life metrics.
CHWV’s benchmark assessment process provides communities with a valuable tool for assessing its progress toward creating healthier places to live, learn, work, eat, and play. These benchmarks are designed to measure community progress in meeting a diverse mix of policy, systems, and environmental priorities.
CHWV’s process helps community leaders identify opportunities, celebrate wins, and clarify priorities.
Despite West Virginia’s poor national rankings, we know that progress is being made in communities all across the state. These places are leading the way and writing a different more positive story about where our state can go. CHWV recognition celebrates, connects, and amplifies health successes happening in every corner of West Virginia so that our state can become a national leader in creating healthy, thriving communities.
CHWV Partners
WV Division of Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention
The Division of Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention (HPCD) takes a comprehensive approach to chronic disease management and prevention, working with communities, health systems, and decision-makers to make it easier for people to be healthy in the places they live, work, play, and pray.
The mission of HPCD is to create intentional change to improve health for all West Virginians by:
- Facilitating a collaboration of diverse partners through community engagement to reduce the burden of chronic disease in WV
- Identifying and challenging social inequities by addressing social determinants of health
- Increasing the capacity of communities to create sustainable and equitable policy, systems, and environmental changes to improve health and wellness across all stages of life
WV State Office of Rural Health
The WV State Office of Rural Health implements programs and promotes best-practices models through collaboration with stakeholders to address rural healthcare. The State Office of Rural Health pursues a vision of equitable access to healthcare services and improved outcomes for citizens.
WVU Office of Health Services Research
West Virginia University’s Office of Health Services Research (WVU OHSR), part of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, has a long-term history of working with state, regional, and national partners on chronic disease prevention and control, cancer prevention and control, health informatics, and quality of care improvement efforts. WVU OHSR has a forty-three-year history of involvement in health-related research activities. We support quality improvement efforts that empower individuals who serve the underserved by helping our partners make better use of their data and technology to inform practice, programs, and policy through hands-on, applied teaching.
The West Virginia Prevention Research Center
The West Virginia Prevention Research Center (WVPRC) is part of a National Network of Prevention Research Centers funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The WVPRC strives to be a transformative force by conducting innovative community-engaged research and evaluation and by translating these into practical and sustainable solutions to improve health in WV and beyond.
We work closely with a long-standing statewide Community Partnership Board to ensure that our research, collaboration, and evaluation activities address the top health priorities and disparities of our state and its communities. The WVPRC has three primary focus areas: substance use and abuse, state health initiatives, and youth and community engagement.