The City of Mesa Spends Over $54 Million for 4,000 Employees' Healthcare Benefits > Is This Better?

For Healthier People, We Need Healthier Neighborhoods

09/02/2016 05:04 pm ET | Updated Sep 02, 2016

By Amy Gillman

National program director for community health and early childhood at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation

Source: Huffington Post

"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.
Isolated investments aren’t our endgame; stronger, healthier communities are.

That requires us to tackle the social determinants of health all in the same place, all at the same time. We are finding that new partnerships are powerful drivers in this regard. Neighborhood leaders are joining forces with universities, hospitals, philanthropy, law enforcement, businesses and policymakers to assess local needs, leverage community assets, ramp up community engagement and measure what works

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