Is your county healthy? According to USA Today, “County Health Rankings: Mobilizing Action Toward Community Health,” a health report card for almost every one of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties, is being released by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute. (Click here for their official website.)
You can enter your county to see the results, but it’s not a simple answer. ”This is a complicated story about what makes a community healthy and another not so healthy,” says report author Pat Remington, the associate dean for public health at the University of Wisconsin. For example, Baltimore and Philadelphia ranked near the bottom in their respective states, despite their world-class hospitals.
“Social, economic and health habits may be at play there,” says James Marks, senior vice president and director of the foundation’s health group.
The report ranks each county in two ways: “Health Outcomes” and “Health Factors.” Health outcomes are derived from a county’s disease and death rates. The health factors rating is more complex, including data from obesity rates, tobacco use and alcohol consumption. Social and economic factors, such as unemployment, income and community safety, also were accounted for in addition to access to health care and environmental factors.
The researchers don’t recommend making state-to-state comparisons, but they do say that healthier counties tend to be urban and suburban, while most (84%) of the 50 least-healthy counties are rural, sparsely populated areas where care is poor and the economy is depressed.
