By Bridget C. Booske, PhD, MHSA
Later tonight, our team at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute will release the 2011 County Health Rankings.
These rankings will provide snapshots of community health for over 3,000 counties throughout the country. In every state, people will be comparing how counties rank on their health outcomes and health factors, based on a wide variety of measures from mortality and quality of life to high school graduation rates, unemployment rates, obesity rates, and air quality. Our model emphasizes that health care is just one of many factors that determine how healthy we are and how long we live and underscores the importance of evidence-based programs and policies to drive population health improvement.
A few hours later, Pat will be joining RWJF President and CEO, Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, for a live Q&A session on Twitter from 2-3 p.m. EDT. We’re welcoming questions to @RWJF_PubHealth and @CHRankings; you can follow the conversation through #healthrankings.
We’re almost as excited about our refreshed and enhanced website as we are about the Rankings themselves. We’ve developed a variety of ways for users to explore and use the data, including state summary reports, downloadable maps, compare and sort capabilities, and both state and national data files. We’ll be unveiling several new tools of our own, and linking to a new tool created by Steven Woolf and colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University: a county health calculator that demonstrates the relationship between education and income with premature deaths.
As we embark on our second year, we’re aware that communities are looking for real-world examples to guide and inspire. Responding to this need, our 2011 website has an expanded section -- Action Steps -- to guide evidence-based program and policy development and a brand new section -- Your Stories -- to showcase how communities across the country are taking action to improve health.
For the past year, communities across the nation have been using the County Health Rankings to galvanize support for and take action to create healthy communities. Tomorrow’s release of the 2011 Rankings is an opportunity to infuse new energy into this movement and bring more people on board. With the health of our communities at stake, this is one wake-up call we can’t afford to let anyone sleep through.
Bridget C. Booske, PhD, MHSA is a Senior Scientist with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and is Deputy Director of the County Health Rankings.
Congratulations for your fantastic work! We will follow and disseminate your work from Public Health Asturias-Spain
Posted by: Rafa Cofiño | 03/29/2011 at 06:47 AM