MHA strives to improve access to wellness education and promote quality of life for every person in our community. As part of this goal, MHA offers a variety of free educational workshops to our community. The information delivered during each workshop is presented by an expert in the corresponding topic. MHA also works collaboratively with Redwood Coast Medical Services to host the monthly Healthy Habits.

Note: Healthy Habits has been put on hold temporarily in accordance with the Mendocino County Public Health orders for COVID-19, which indicate that gatherings of larger than 6 are currently not permitted. However, MHA is still providing health education workshops virtually through Zoom.

If you or a loved one has been newly diagnosed with a chronic condition, such as hypertension, diabetes, cancer, etc., or if you have been struggling to manage a condition and haven’t found a solution that works best for you, we encourage you to try MHA’s Living a Healthy Life with Chronic Conditions course. This is a six-week educational opportunity that is free to the community and available for people of all ages. The course and materials used throughout the six-week class were developed by Stanford University’s Self-Management Resource Center, where MHA staff trained so that the course can be available locally.

In this course, participants learn skills that are used to set goals, develop health plans and become more comfortable taking charge of their health care. Making lifestyle changes for your health is not easy but with MHA’s help, we hope to make that possible.

MHA provides free health screenings throughout the MHA Service Area. The types of screenings currently available include blood pressure and cholesterol screenings. Coming soon: Glucose (A1c), Hepatitis C and HIV screenings.

Health screenings can be accessed in two ways:

1. By dropping by one of our Scheduled Screening locations (COVID-19 Update: Appointments are required).
2. By scheduling an appointment at the MHA office located in Gualala.

Learning from our community and convening resources is something we aim to do at MHA. MHA hosts a variety of outreach events, such as the annual All School Health Fair that convenes dozens of health, safety and emergency organizations in an effort to provide our youth, teachers and parents with educational materials and connections to local resources.

MHA also develops and launches annual Community Health Needs Assessments in order to learn about the community’s most urgent needs relating to health care and life on our isolated coast.

In MHA’s 2019 Opioid/Substance Use Needs Assessment, it was discovered that an estimated 12% of residents in the Mendonoma Service Area are dependent on one or more substances, with methamphetamines, opioids and alcohol misuse showing the greatest community-wide prevalence. Other research by MHA in 2018 shows that local youth, grades 9 through 12, reported misuse of opioids at four times higher than the national average, as reported by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services in 2016.

In response to this data, MHA collaborates with Partner Organizations to provide preventative services that help to educate the community about substance and opioid dependency, while reducing overdose death rates due to accidental ingestion of pain medication or accidental overdose.

Each year, three million older people are treated in emergency departments for fall injuries. A Matter of Balance is an 8-week class intended to help reduce falls by emphasizing practical strategies to reduce fear of falling and increase activity levels. MHA’s goal is to educate community members to view falls and fear of falling as controllable. This class is free and provided to individuals 60 years and older. Participants are taught how to set realistic goals to increase activity, how to change their environment to reduce fall risk factors, and learn exercises that increase range of motion, strength and balance.