Many of you have an interest in public and community health so I wanted to pass this along to you.
How healthy is your county? A new set of reports that were released today rank the overall health of nearly every county in the nation, confirming for the second year the critical role that factors such as education, jobs, income, environment and access to health care play in how healthy people are and how long they live.
Published online at www.countyhealthrankings.org by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the County Health Rankings look at a variety of measures that affect health, such as high school graduation rates, access to healthier foods, air pollution levels, income, and rates of smoking, obesity and teen births. This is the only tool of its kind that allows people to see how their county compares with others in their state and against national benchmarks in areas like diabetes screening rates or number of uninsured adults, and makes it possible for leaders in all sectors to identify gaps and work together to develop solutions.
That was very interesting. In the neighboring county where I work, they rank 8 out of 64 which is pretty good, but the county I live in ranks 50 out of 64. That is not so good. I do know that the people in our parish on average are poorer than in Lafayette and more of our citizens are of cajun desent where there is a lot of greasy fried food and beer consumption.
Thanks for sharing
Wow, this site is way cool. I found St Charles County in Missouri, where I live and found great results. Maybe this type of information will help counties take steps to improve environmental health of their community.
Thanks Dale for the resource!