Hennepin County Looks at Future Health Needs with SHAPE Survey

Local health officials are in the process of trying to determine the overall health of Hennepin County residents. But they need residents to take the SHAPE survey in order to make that happen.

“For doing the type of planning that we want to be able to do within Hennepin County, we’d like to be able to know which communities are most affected,” says Dave Johnson with Hennepin County Public Health. “We’d also like to know which parts of the county we want to target programs.”

Residents asked to take SHAPE survey

Hennepin County’s Public Health Department has mailed out 40,000 SHAPE surveys to households all across the county. The surveys go out once every four years to randomly selected households that re representative of hte county’s population. They are asking people to share information about health, diet, exercise and the ability to get health care.

“What we are trying to do here is to really get full participation,” explains Johnson. “So that we can say that this is truly representative of the survey. We can also look down within populations and see where we need to target services.”

Answers from the survey can help county officials decide things such as where to build new bike lanes or where they should implement anti-smoking campaigns. The survey takes about 20 minutes to complete.