CUDA: Where we live affects our health - the question is why? The goal of the County Health Rankings Project is to find the answer. By examining data from counties all over the country, the project hopes to identify how multiple factors impact our health from sexually transmitted disease rates to high school graduation rates, to the quality of health facilities care. The idea is that the information will help community leaders see that the quality of our communities influences how healthy we are and how long we live. Lisa Frazier is with the Health Policy Institute of Ohio.
FRAZIER: There are 24 measures that they're ranking on --It's very easy to look item by item and then see what you're ranking is and then look at that number and see how it compares to counties like yours. It can be useful because you can say, if smoking rates are tied to employment and low income and poor education programs in the schools to prevent smoking behaviors in the first place. It's a way to at least start a conversation like the ones people are having inside this room right now, about how these factors impact one another and how they're tied to one another
CUDA: In a conference room at Akron general hospital, fifty leaders in health care or health policy from more than half a dozen Northeast Ohio counties are sitting around tables comparing themselves to their peers, and brainstorming ways to improve.
GROUP TALKING AT TABLE: We can find out what counties are number 1, number 2, number 3 on smoking cessation, find out what they are doing in order to reach those rates ... and I think that's the whole purpose of this ....
CUDA: It's all part of a workshop aimed at educating community leaders in the health care industry about how to use the ranking data to target areas of weakness their own communities.
TOTH: This went way up this year - chlamydia rate almost doubled, obviously that's an area we have to work with the high schoolers on that one.
CUDA: That's Nancy Toth, a health educator from Lorain County. She's sitting at the same table as Najeebah Shine who directs the community outreach for the Cuyahoga County Board of Health.
SHINE: I think we could use it in our county to continue to have that conversation about how we have to move beyond clinical care because we're ranked fairly high in clinical care but we have other areas where we need to do some work --
CUDA: Shine says that the data itself isn't surprising, but it validates what she and others already know -- namely building healthy communities requires more than doctors......
SHINE: we have to think of health as more than just health care. When you look at some of the other things that are included in this health ranking -- for example graduation, poverty and unemployment if there is no additional resources to deal with those issues giving someone access is not enough --
CUDA: One of the most obvious patterns in the data is the strong association between income and health ranking. Delaware county, which ranked healthiest, has one of the highest per capita incomes in the state, where as Lawrence and Scioto counties ranked worst, and are among the most impoverished counties. And as Sarah Gudz, of the Ohio State department of health points out, having a bad a ranking can be both a blessing and a curse...
GUDZ: Someone might genuinely say, what is my motivation for going to the county that ranks 88th? But the good thing for these counties that rank at the bottom of this data is that they now have some leverage to say, we want some of our tax dollars back in our communities so that we can work on these things -- because we need them.
CUDA: And according to Lisa Frazier those data show that even when those dollars are applied to things communities need other than health care, they can make a big difference.
FRAZIER: all policy ends up being health policy. Policies about education and employment and even land use --those factors impact health outcomes and health policy as well.
CUDA: The next step says Frazier, is helping communities develop strategies to tackle a specific issue - but for now - it's enough to get people to start to change the way their leaders think about health. Gretchen Cuda, 90.3