County Health Rankings Show That There Is More to Health than Health Care
For the second year, the County Health Rankings confirm the critical role that factors such as education, jobs, income, and environment play in how healthy people are and how long they live. This year, the Rankings allow people in more than 3,000 counties and the District of Columbia to compare the overall health of their counties against other counties in their state, and also compare their performance on specific health factors against national benchmarks of top-performing counties.
Published on-line at www.countyhealthrankings.org by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Rankings help counties understand what influences how healthy residents are and how long they will live. The Rankings look at a variety of measures that affect health such as the rate of people dying before age 75, high school graduation rates, access to healthier foods, air pollution levels, income, and rates of smoking, obesity and teen births.
The Rankings, based on the latest data available for each county, is the only tool of its kind that measures the overall health of each county in all 50 states on the multiple factors that influence health. It includes snapshots of nearly every county with a color-coded map that compares each county’s overall health with other counties in each of the 50 states. People can compare how their county is doing in areas like diabetes screening rates or number of uninsured adults to national benchmarks.
In addition, to further illustrate the connection between social factors and health, the Foundation along with the Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center on Human Needs unveiled the County Health Calculator. The County Health Calculator is a new interactive online app that shows people how much higher levels of education and income influence premature death rates in a county.
For a copy of the entire press release, click here.
To view the Map of Virginia with the rankings, click here.
