"Poverty is a place-based public health crisis," writes Amy Gillman, LISC's director of community health, in a blog for The Huffington Post. A partnership with the County Health Rankings, which measure the wellbeing of people in nearly every U.S. county, is helping us hone our strategies for getting at the tangled social, economic and physical roots of poor health in low-income neighborhoods.
If you were to stop a dozen people on the street and ask them about the health of their communities, you would likely get wildly different answers. Some might come at it from a medical perspective, like access to doctors, hospitals or pharmacies. Others might think about pollution or water quality, or perhaps consider the neighborhood's economic health and whether residents have good jobs.
Very few, I suspect, would recognize that all of these factors, and more, play a role. Despite mounting data showing the linkages between place and physical wellbeing, most of us don't think of our personal health and our neighborhoods as being part of the same equation.
LISC's own research touches on some of this, finding that significant community investments—from jobs to safety to housing to businesses--help low-income residents live better and make neighborhoods more resilient. But our random sampling might reasonably ask: do those kinds of investments really make people "healthier"?
In fact, they do. The well-being of our communities has a much greater influence on how long we live and how healthy we are than our health care system does. The latest release of the County Health Rankings offers some critical insight on the question. The Rankings—a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute—measures the health of nearly every county in the country based on more than 30 different factors.
I think the backstory of those numbers is telling. If you take a look at the model, you'll see that clinical care measures account for just 20 percent of a county's overall health. The other 80 percent? Social and economic measures like education and employment; the quality of the physical environment, like housing and air/water quality; and individual health and lifestyle considerations, like smoking and obesity.
Think about that for a minute. The vast majority of what affects our health is outside the doctor's office. If we want a healthier population, we have to look at how and where we live. Continued[+]...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amy Gillman, Director of Community Health
Amy focuses on integrating health and wellness strategies into LISC’s neighborhood revitalization work. She also oversees our early childhood and healthy food lending activities, and has been instrumental in the development of 190 early learning facilities and leveraging some $96 million to make good nutrition more accessible in low-income places.