Shannon's Window: Partnership putting us on a healthier track


  • December 23, 2013
  • /   Shannon Nickinson
  • /   community-dashboard
It would be great if this Christmas present turned into a new year’s resolution we all could live with. The Partnership for a Healthy Community was one of 12 groups nationwide to receive a “community coach” from the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps program at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. The grant comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a national philanthropic group devoted to health and health care. It will pay for the expertise of Jan O’Neill, who will help Partnership leaders find ways to obesity and unhealthy weight gain, a longstanding problem in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties. The Partnership began in 1994 as a joint effort of Baptist Healthcare and Sacred Heart Health System to assess the community’s health status and report those findings. And those findings, my friends, have been grim. The comprehensive health surveys of residents of Escambia and Santa Rosa counties in were done in 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2012. The surveys measure outcomes in various areas of health including prevalence of chronic disease related to lifestyle, (diabetes, high blood pressure, etc.), obesity rates, causes of death and the like. The results in 2005 were worse than those in 2000. The results of the 2012 survey showed no marked improvement in the seven years since the last survey. We eat too much. We smoke too much. We don’t exercise enough. We drink too much alcohol and have a higher rate of alcohol-related injuries and crashes than peer counties. The rate of STD transmission is higher than peer counties. The incidence of sexual violence is appalling higher than peer counties. We use the emergency department too frequently for things that we ought to be seeing a primary care doctor for. The Partnership this year turned its efforts toward trying to change some of these outcomes. And that’s where O’Neill will come in. Through the Live Well Northwest Florida initiative for weight management, O’Neill use 25 years of experience to help design a community strategy to improve our weight management in the two-county area, which ranks 19th out of 22 Florida metropolitan statistical areas. If we want in the new year, to raise our community’s profile, to be thought of as more than “Lower Alabama,” we need to take some steps of our own, figuratively and literally. We need to take a walk around the block instead of a drive. We need fresh air to clear our minds before we make dinner or issue a press release. We need to flock to a farmers market with as much enthusiasm as we flock to Krispy Kreme.  We need a healthy community not only for the sake of the life span of our residents, but also for the life span of our community as we seek to compete in an ever-expanding marketplace. That means being honest about the blow this data deals to the perception of our community by the outside world. We already “pay” for these poor outcomes as a society. Every time someone uses the emergency room for something that would have been cheaper and better handled by a primary care doctor, you and I pay for it. Every time a business evaluates our community as spot to possibly relocate or expand a business and they see this data, you and I pay for it. Here’s hoping that O’Neill’s work will help us get more for our money.
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