ORIGINAL PAPER Health Needs Assessment of Plain Populations in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Kirk Miller 1 • Berwood Yost 2 • Christina Abbott 3 • Scottie Thompson 2 • Emily Dlugi 4 • Zachary Adams 5 • Meryl Schulman 6 • Nicole Strauss 7 Published online: 20 July 2016 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 Abstract We performed a health needs assessment for three Plain communities in Lancaster County, Pennsylva- nia from a random sample of households. Compared with the general population of adults, Plain respondents were more likely to be married, to have children, and they had large families; they were more likely to drink well water, to eat fruit and vegetables, to drink raw milk, and to live on a farm. Plain respondents had better physical and mental health and were less likely to have been diagnosed with various medical conditions compared with the general population of adults in Lancaster County but Old Order Mennonite respondents were more likely to have been diagnosed compared with Old Order Amish respondents. Plain respondents usually have a regular doctor and often receive preventive care but Old Order Mennonite respon- dents were more likely to have a regular doctor, to receive preventive care, to have had their children vaccinated, and to receive routine dental care compared with Old Order Amish respondents. Despite their relative geographic and genetic isolation, and despite the small, relative differences noted, the health of Plain communities in Lancaster County is similar to that of other adults in the County. Keywords Amish Á Old Order Mennonite Á Health needs Á Household survey Introduction Health needs assessments are important for communities to identify needs, allocate resources, and recognize inequali- ties. Needs assessments of entire communities or large geographic areas, however, sometimes miss pockets of disparate needs, underserved groups, or groups typically not captured by standard survey methods. Lancaster County PA is a largely rural county in the southeastern part of the state with mostly German her- itage and with a small urban area with high concentra- tions of African-Americans and Hispanics; it is also the center of distribution of the Amish and Mennonite cultures. The county is served by three large hospital systems, one of which is the largest employer in the county. Patients seeking extreme specialist care go either to Penn State Hershey Medical Center in Hershey PA or to one of several nationally-ranked hospitals in Philadelphia. Several Anabaptist sects migrated to America between about 1683 and 1860 to avoid religious persecution. The best known of these is the Old Order Amish of Lancaster This research was supported by an award to Franklin & Marshall College from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Undergraduate Science Education Program. Dlugi, Adams, Schulman, and Strauss were undergraduates at Franklin and Marshall College. & Kirk Miller Kirk.Miller@fandm.edu 1 Department of Biology, Franklin and Marshall College, 415 Harrisburg Ave., Lancaster, PA 17603, USA 2 Floyd Institute Center for Opinion Research, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, USA 3 Department of Psychology, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, USA 4 Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, Baltimore, MD, USA 5 Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA 6 Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, New York, NY, USA 7 MGH Institute for Health Policy, Boston, MA, USA 123 J Community Health (2017) 42:35–42 DOI 10.1007/s10900-016-0223-5