Latest News
03/09/2010
CHW President & CEO, Greg Dent, gives a live interview for the Fox 24 WGXA evening news. More information to follow.
03/09/2010
CHW announces the first quarterly Health Summit Meetings for Jones, Monroe, and Twiggs Counties. Click links above for press releases.
02/26/2010
The Sun News covered CHW's recent meeting in Fort Valley to investigate the need for a Federally Qualified Health Center in their community. (News Article)
02/24/2010
The Fort Valley Leader Tribune covered CHW's Health Summit activities in Fort Valley. (PDF Article)
02/05/2010
Community Health Works announces the Crawford County community meeting of the CGRHS to be held on February 22, 2010 at 6pm at the CGTC Crawford County Center Conference Room #107. (Press Release)
02/02/2010
The Sun News (Macon Telegraph) featured an article covering Community Health Works' Peach County community health center planning meeting held January 28, 2010 in Fort Valley. (Web site Link)
01/22/2010
The Macon Telegraph covered the Houston County meeting of the Central Georgia Regional Health Summit and the working being done by Community Health Works to tackle the problem of obesity in Central Georgia. (Web site Link)
01/21/2010
41 WMGT highlights Community Health Works' work to open a Community Health Center in Peach County. (Video Link)
CHW announces the Peach County Health Center Planning meeting to be held on January 28, 2010 at 6pm at the Pettigrew Center at FVSU. (Invitation)
01/19/2010
Community leaders attended the January 18, 2010 Bibb County Community Meeting of the CGRHS. The event was covered by 41 WMGT television. (Website Link)
01/14/2010
CHW announces upcoming community meeting concerning the need for a health center in Peach County. (Press Release)
01/12/2010
CHW released press releases concerning the upcoming community meetings in Bibb and Houston counties for the Central Georgia Regional Health Summit. Please click the links above for more details.
12/10/2009
Community Health Works was the cover story in the recent edition of M.D. News magazine. M.D. News highlighted the diverse work CHW is performing. An online edition of the magazine is available here.
12/10/2009
The Georgia Health Policy Center at Georgia State University issued a report concerning the Central Georgia Regional Health Summit. This comprehensive report can be found here.
12/09/2009
The Central Georgia Cancer Coalition and Georgia College and State University are proud to announce the 2010 Oncology Nurse Navigator certification program at GCSU. Click here for details.
11/25/2009
NBC 41 WMGT television featured a story on how Monroe Primary Care, a joint project between CHW and the Monroe County Hospital, is providing Monroe county residents more healthcare options. (Video Link)
11/18/2009
Macon city council member Nancy White submitted a column entitled "Obesity is Killing Middle Georgia," to the 11th Hour magazine. Her column speaks to work done by CHW and the Central Georgia Regional Health Summit. (Link to Column)
11/11/2009
Community Health Works announces that teachers in Houston and Bibb County will be the first of seven central Georgia school districts to have access to Health Teacher’s comprehensive K through 12 online health education curriculum with the goal of improving the health literacy of children and teens in Central Georgia. (Press Release)
11/08/2009
Monroe Primary Care, a joint project between Community Health Works and the Monroe County Hospital was featured in today's Macon Telegraph. Click here to read the article.
11/04/2009
Community Health Works has moved into our new office in the Gateway Plaza located at 300 Mulberry Street - Suite 603 in Macon, GA. Click here for a our "Join Us" page containing our updated contact information and a Google Map.
10/22/2009
Community Health Works brought together community leaders to plan meaningful ways to substantially improve health in central Georgia. Click here to read the Macon Telegraph’s coverage of the event.| Click here to link to the story on the Fox 24 web site.
10/05/2009
The Macon Telegraph recently published an opinion editorial concerning a local approach to healthcare reform by CHW CEO Greg Dent. Click here for the text of Greg's editorial.
08/27/2009
Community Health Works is pleased to announce that it has been awarded an $80,000 Health Center Planning Grant for Peach County Georgia. (Press Release)
08/13/2009
Community Health Works announces that it has been awarded a $150,000 Rural Health Network grant to implement a Cardiac Care Initiative. (Press Release)
Macon Telegraph - Opinion Editorial
True health reform begins right here
By Greg Dent
10/04/09
health-care reform and may pass some form of legislation by the end of the year. Even if it works perfectly and does exactly what its sponsors hope and predict, it will fall far short of solving all of our health-care challenges.
At the end of the day, real progress in improving our health status and lowering our health-care costs will fall to us at the individual and community level.
For the past decade, Community Health Works, a nonprofit corporation, has been working to improve the health status of the nearly 400,000 Georgians who reside in seven Central Georgia counties — Bibb, Crawford, Houston, Jones, Monroe, Peach and Twiggs.
Last year we took a major step forward with the completion and publication of a report entitled “Healthy Living in Middle Georgia: A Community Needs Analysis.” That report, funded with a grant from state’s Office of Rural Health, constitutes the first comprehensive effort to document the health status of Central Georgians and the barriers they face to living healthier lives.
Next week, we take another major step forward and will hopefully build on the work that went into the “Healthy Living” report. Wednesday morning, an estimated 50-to-75 business, government and health-care leaders will gather for a leadership breakfast to kick off work on a plan to tackle just one of the major health problems afflicting our region: Obesity.
Later in the month, a larger group will gather for the first Central Georgia Regional Health Summit with a goal of putting together a workable plan to mount an attack on this problem.
The truth is we had our share of widespread health problems to focus on, including smoking, drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness, among many others. But obesity was the biggest — and the one that holds the greatest prospect for both improving individual health status and reducing health-care costs.
It’s easy to dismiss someone else’s challenge with weight control as a personal problem — and it most certainly is that. But it has become so pervasive that it rises, in our view, to the level of a community challenge, and one we should take on together.
The sad truth is that adults in the seven counties served by Community Health Works smoke more, exercise less and are more obese than their counterparts in other parts of the state and the nation. According to state research conducted from 2004 through 2006, fully 31.1 percent of Middle Georgia adults were obese, versus 26.5 percent of all Georgia adults. It’s hard to imagine those numbers have improved in the last couple of years.
Obese adults are far more likely to suffer from heart disease, hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes and some forms of cancer than non-obese adults, and those conditions, of course, come with huge human and economic price tags. The human costs are easy enough to see, including limited productivity, shortened life spans and diminished quality of life.
The economic costs also are obvious, if difficult to quantify. In recent years, however, various studies have begun to do exactly that — and the price tag is enormous. In 2005, the journal Health Affairs reported that employers and privately insured families spent $36.5 billion on obesity-linked illnesses in 2002 — up 10-fold from an inflation-adjusted $3.6 billion just five years earlier.
Those numbers have continued to swell. In a recent article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dr. Kenneth Thorpe, chairman of Department of Health Policy and Management at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, pegged reducing obesity as a critical factor in controlling our health-care costs.
He reported that obesity is estimated to be responsible for nearly a third of the rise in inflation-adjusted health-care spending between 1987 and 2006, or about $220 billion.
“If we 
cut excess from consumer behavior due to conditions related to obesity and overweight,” Dr. Thorpe added, “we could save that amount per year.”
Let’s think about that and do the local math. Working with 2008 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, Central Georgia’s 390,674 residents represented just over one-tenth of one percent of the total U.S. population of 304 million. Apply that figure — .1285 percent, to be exact — to $220 billion and you come up with $282.7 million in potential annual health expenditure savings in our little seven-county region of Georgia.
Where I come from, $282.7 million is still real money.
Of course, we don’t have a magic wand that we can use to eliminate obesity all at once. But even if we manage to shave just one measly percentage point a year off the current total, that would yield about $9 million a year in reduced health-care spending. Over time, it adds up.
Take it down another level and think about it from your own perspective — whatever that is. If you own or manage a business, take a look around and think about how much money you could save (and how much healthier and more productive your employees would be) if you could reduce and ultimately eliminate obesity in your workplace. If you’re a local government leader, think about how much you might be able to trim your annual indigent care payments to local health-care providers by making a significant dent in local obesity.
If you’re a local hospital administrator, ask your financial staff to figure out how much of your uncompensated care costs are associated with obesity. And if you’re one of the 100,000-plus residents of Middle Georgia who could stand to lose a little or a lot, think about just how much happier and healthier — and maybe even wealthier — you could be by losing that extra weight.
These are all goals worth working toward. This week, I’m confident Middle Georgia will take important first steps toward reaching them. We’ve all got a lot to gain. Or lose.
Greg Dent is president and CEO of Community Health Works. For more information about the Central Georgia Regional Health Summit, go to www.cgrhs.org