About Us

Live Well Waco is a coalition dedicated to improving the health of people living, working and playing in McLennan County. It came together with funding from the Transforming Texas Grant awarded to the Waco-McLennan County Public Health District from the Department of State Health Services in 2012. However, the Live Well Waco Coalition (formerly the Power of Prevention Coalition) began more than five years ago as a collaborative effort between community businesses, organizations, and individuals who are dedicated to the health of McLennan County residents and focuses on improving area health disparities.

Live Well Waco has recently been adopted by the Mayor-appointed community health improvement plan workgroup and is part of the city’s master plan using the Collective Impact Model referred to as Prosper Waco to decrease poverty, increase health, and increase education.

Take a look at the differences between chronic diseases in 2010, 2013, and 2016 for McLennan County residents.

**Source: 2016 Waco-McLennan County Community Health Needs Assessment and Trended Health Report 2016

*Due to the different weighting of the 2010, 2013, and 2016 CHNA data, the percentage of heart problems and diabetes are not able to be trended. For more information, see the explanation below.

Many of the questions included in these assessments were modeled after the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). When conducting population surveys, it is often necessary to weight observations since those who participated in the survey do not match the general population fully. Weighting is a statistical method to account for this discrepancy and allows the weighted results to be representative of the entire population.

In order to compare the McLennan County population at the 2013 and 2016 CHNA time points, it was necessary to re-weight the 2013 CHNA data in accordance with the newest method used to weight the 2016 CHNA data. This allows the data to be representative of the population of McLennan County at these times. The standard error for the 2016 and newly weighted 2013 data is higher than previous CHNA reports, and thus should be used only as an estimate of the population.

It is important to note, when looking at the information, that the weighting method was not replicable for the 2010 CHNA data. Because the 2010 data was weighted on other variables and the raw data is unavailable to reweight, the data points should be considered as a separate point of time. The increase or decrease one might infer from the data, between 2010 and 2013, is not statistically significant or representative of the true health status change so the 2010 CHNA is considered a reference point.