Is your Community Healthy?

The passage of the Affordable Care Act created a renewed emphasis on community prevention and population health. With the Prevention and Public Health Fund and the Community Transformation Grants, resources are now available to improve the health of communities around the country. But how do you know how healthy your community is?

On Wednesday, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (http://www.rwjf.org/) and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute (http://uwphi.pophealth.wisc.edu/) released the 2011 County Health Rankings (http://www.countyhealthrankings.org/). The County Health Rankings are a key component of the Mobilizing Action Toward Community Health (MATCH) project—a nationwide call to action for improving community health—first released last year. The rankings generate 50 state reports, ranking each county within the 50 states according to its health outcomes and the multiple health factors that determine a county’s health. The four different types of health factors are health behaviors, clinical care, social and economic factors, and the physical environment. Specific county-level data (as well as state benchmarks) are also available. The Rankings are built on America’s Health Rankings, an annual comprehensive assessment of the nation’s health on a state-by-state analysis, which is published jointly by United Health Foundation, the American Public Health Association and Partnership for Prevention.

Many counties around the country have used the Rankings to implement strategies and initiate interventions to positively influence health factors and improve their health outcomes. One specific example is Wyandotte County, Kansas, where Mayor Joe Reardon worked with other local stakeholders to create a Healthy Communities initiative after seeing his state’s low rank in last year’s County Health Rankings report.

A new development with this year’s Rankings is the launch of an innovative tool, the County Health Calculator (http://chc.humanneeds.vcu.edu/). The calculator is a new interactive online application that simulates the affect of higher levels of education and income on health in a county. It was developed by Center of Human Needs at Virginia Commonwealth University (http://humanneeds.vcu.edu/) with funding by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Read more on Partnership’s community prevention efforts here.

Baltimore’s Healthy Homes Program, Increase in Casual Sex Named Best/Worst Prevention Ideas of the Week

Baltimore’s holistic approach to unhealthy housing was named the “Best Prevention Idea of the Week,” while the increase in casual sex was named the “Worst Prevention Idea of the Week."

The “Best/Worst” awards are announced each week in “Prevention Matters,” the blog of Partnership for Prevention. Nominees are submitted by Partnership staff as well as the general public, and are voted on by the staff. Partnership for Prevention is a nonpartisan organization of business, nonprofit and government leaders who are working to make evidence-based disease prevention and health promotion a national priority. More information is available at http://www.prevent.org/.

BEST

Baltimore takes a holistic approach to unhealthy housing

Baltimore is the site of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's first Healthy Homes program, an attempt to coordinate efforts on lead abatement, asthma and injury prevention, indoor air pollution and fire safety. "It's not unusual for a community health worker to take care of lead only to have a child die in a fire, or fall out the window," said Mary Jean Brown, chief of the Lead Poisoning Prevention branch at CDC. "The Healthy Homes approach recognizes all these things that can happen in homes. So you take your lead prevention army and equip them with tools so that they can address more than one problem at once."

WORST

Casual Sex Increasing in U.S.

People in non-romantic sexual relationships today are likely to have multiple partners, researchers have found, and that behavior could promote the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. "The United States has seen a major shift toward non-romantic sexual partnerships -- people becoming sexually involved when they are just casually dating or not dating at all," study author Anthony Paik, a sociologist at the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said in a university news release. "People can make their own choices, but we hope this information will be useful as they weigh the risks and rewards of non-romantic sexual relationships," Paik said. "We encourage people to be aware of the potential for sexual concurrency and take appropriate precautions to avoid sexually transmitted infections."