The Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic Policy on Social Needs Across the State of Kansas and Western Missouri: Paired Survey Response Testing

BACKGROUND: Studying patients’ social needs is critical to the understanding of health conditions and disparities, and to inform strategies for improving health outcomes. Studies have shown that people of color, low-income families, and those with lower educational attainment experience greater hardships related to social needs. The COVID-19 pandemic represents an event that severely impacted people’s social needs. This pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, and contributed to food and housing insecurity, while highlighting weaknesses in the health care system surrounding access to care. To combat these issues, legislators implemented unique policies and procedures to help alleviate worsening social needs throughout the pandemic, which had not previously been exerted to this degree. We believe that improvements related to COVID-19 legislature and policy have positively impacted people’s social needs in Kansas and Missouri, United States. In particular, Wyandotte County is of interest as it suffers greatly from issues related to social needs that many of these COVID-19–related policies aimed to improve. OBJECTIVE: The research objective of this study was to evaluate the change in social needs before and after the COVID-19 pandemic declaration based on responses to a survey from The University of Kansas Health System (TUKHS). We further aimed to compare the social needs of respondents from Wyandotte County from those of respondents in other counties in the Kansas City metropolitan area. METHODS: Social needs survey data from 2016 to 2022 were collected from a 12-question patient-administered survey distributed by TUKHS during a patient visit. This provided a longitudinal data set with 248,582 observations, which was narrowed down into a paired-response data set for 50,441 individuals who had provided at least one response before and after March 11, 2020. These data were then bucketed by county into Cass (Missouri), Clay (Missouri), Jackson (Missouri), Johnson (Kansas), Leavenworth (Kansas), Platte (Missouri), Wyandotte (Kansas), and Other counties, creating groupings with at least 1000 responses in each category. A pre-post composite score was calculated for each individual by adding their coded responses (yes=1, no=0) across the 12 questions. The Stuart-Maxwell marginal homogeneity test was used to compare the pre and post composite scores across all counties. Additionally, McNemar tests were performed to compare responses before and after March 11, 2020, for each of the 12 questions across all counties. Finally, McNemar tests were performed for questions 1, 7, 8, 9, and 10 for each of the bucketed counties. Significance was assessed at P<.05 for all tests. RESULTS: The Stuart-Maxwell test for marginal homogeneity was significant (P<.001), indicating that respondents were overall less likely to identify an unmet social need after the COVID-19 pandemic. McNemar tests for individual questions indicated that after the COVID-19 pandemic, respondents across all counties were less likely to identify unmet social needs related to food availability (odds ratio [OR]=0.4073, P<.001), home utilities (OR=0.4538, P<.001), housing (OR=0.7143, P<.001), safety among cohabitants (OR=0.6148, P<.001), safety in their residential location (OR=0.6172, P<.001), child care (OR=0.7410, P<0.01), health care access (OR=0.3895, P<.001), medication adherence (OR=0.5449, P<.001), health care adherence (OR=0.6378, P<.001), and health care literacy (0.8729, P=.02), and were also less likely to request help with these unmet needs (OR=0.7368, P<.001) compared with prepandemic responses. Responses from individual counties were consistent with the overall results for the most part. Notably, no individual county demonstrated a significant reduction in social needs relating to a lack of companionship. CONCLUSIONS: Post-COVID-19 responses showed improvement across almost all social needs–related questions, indicating that the federal policy response possibly had a positive impact on social needs across the populations of Kansas and western Missouri. Some counties were impacted more than others and positive outcomes were not limited to urban counties. The availability of resources, safety net services, access to health care, and educational opportunities could play a role in this change. Future research should focus on improving survey response rates from rural counties to increase their sample size, and to evaluate other explanatory variables such as food pantry access, educational status, employment opportunities, and access to community resources. Government policies should be an area of focused research as they may affect the social needs and health of the individuals considered in this analysis.