ZMCHD Health Plans for 2026

ZANESVILLE, Ohio – The Zanesville Muskingum County Health Department deals with a wide variety of health concerns, which prompts them to think ahead.

ZMCHD Community Health Planner Michelle Shroyer announced the upcoming release of the 2026-2028 Community Health Improvement Plan and detailed some of the key issues the health department will be involved with. 

“There will be four priorities we will be working on. Which include Behavioral Health, which is substance use disorder, mental health. Healthy eating, active living, which falls under the Healthy Behaviors priority. Education and Literacy and Housing and Insecurity. From our community health assessment that we did earlier this year, we ended up finding projects that we wanted to work on that could help improve the health of the community. So those were the four priorities and we also have special projects that we’ll be working on,” Shroyer said.

The local community health questionnaire gathers the people’s health concerns and gets presented to the Healthier Muskingum County Network, who then look for solutions and results. 

“So yes, the community assessment that was done earlier in the spring, from those findings is what led to the priorities and the development of the goals and projects we’ll be working on. So for the county, we make sure we get an accurate sample size so the accurate sample size is 350 or more people that have responded to the survey,” Shroyer said.

The Community Health Improvement Plan is a creation of the Healthier Muskingum County Network, which is a collaboration of more than 70 agencies and organizations that can view and approach these issues from different angles.