Categorized | Health

How healthy is Hawaii County compared to the state?

MEDIA RELEASE

The North Hawaii Outcomes Project (NHOP) is a project of The Earl and Doris Bakken Foundation and works to support existing and future efforts to improve the health and quality of life in North Hawaii by developing a common useful community health profile.

The purpose of a common health profile is to clarify common goals and to both track and facilitate community health improvement.

NHOP uses the Institute of Medicine Health, Community Improvement Process (CHIP) which serves as the model for linking community health data and improvement.

In its latest report, NHOP shows the health of the people of Hawaii County is consistently worse than the state average. The goal of this report is to clearly identify the large health disparities in Hawaii County and their causes, in order to mobilize action and resources to improve health and healthcare in Hawaii County.

Why is the health of Hawaii County worse than the State of Hawaii?

Differences in the health of populations are related to differences in four key areas:

* Biology or genetic predisposition
* Social and economic determinants
* Health‐related behaviors
* Health systems, especially access to healthcare Hawaii County has lower income per capita, more income disparity; higher smoking, and binge drinking rates and significantly lower access to healthcare.

What would help most to improve the health of the people of Hawaii County?

Improving the health of the people of Hawaii County will require:

* Improving education
* Improving economic development o Improving workforce
development
* Improving access to healthcare
* Increasing the proportion of the population who are insured
* Increasing the healthcare workforce
* Improving both systems and individual changes to reduce smoking and problem drinking, including drinking and driving

Where is there evidence of improvement in health indicators in Hawaii County?

There is evidence of improvement in Hawaii County between 2000 ‐2008 in the traffic death rate, infant mortality, and the rate of confirmed child abuse.

There is also improvement in coronary heart disease death rate, though Hawaii County remains consistently higher than the state.

There is improvement in reducing smoking in Hawaii County, although again Hawaii County remains higher than the state.

Reasons for Improvements:

In all of the above areas there has been significant island‐wide collaboration, a clear structure for collaboration, implementation of evidence based strategies, and mobilization of state and federal resources. Improvements in transportation and reducing substance abuse have come through strong county leadership.

Where are the biggest needs and opportunities for improvement?

Reducing the many health disparities in Hawaii County will require addressing the underlying social economic, behavioral and health system causes of those disparities.

Improving health behaviors will decrease the need for health services. This will require addressing underlying issues including depression and self‐medication with alcohol and drugs. Integrating screening for depression, problem drink and chemical dependency into primary care and emergency care has been shown to be effective elsewhere and could help.

Reducing unemployment, and low income per capita will require countywide economic development and simultaneously “preserving what’s special.”

One sector for economic development which will also improve health through improving health access is development of the health services sector.

Economic development of the health sector has been shown to have a strong economic multiplier effect nationally. Economic development will also require a workforce development through strong public education.

Economic development will require improving the physical environment through improving affordable housing and public transportation.

There is clear need for improvement in health systems. Increasing the ratio of physicians and dentists to population, and the proportion of the population with a personal physician will require addressing the current large healthcare provider workforce shortage.

Attracting and retaining high quality health professionals is a challenge because the cost of living is relatively high, and reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid and private insurers is relatively low. At the same time, the demands for night and weekend call are high.

Improving health status for North Hawaii and Hawaii County will require effectively addressing the complex issues behind physician and health professional workforce shortages.

Partnerships between providers, employers, payers, insurers and government to improve access to primary care in Hawaii County are essential to improve health status in North Hawaii and Hawaii County.

The full Community Health Profile, dated April 2010, can be found under he Publications heading at www.nhop.org

One Response to “How healthy is Hawaii County compared to the state?”

  1. Simple beginnings in Improving our community/our country , being able to purchase produce such as vegetables/fruits for reasonable prices, instead the prices have escalated 500% and the locals now tend to purchase cereals, crackers and bread as their main meals due to the cheap costs. In the long run this has created a huge amount of our children having learning disabilities, so what does our state do about it, medicate the kids so they don't act out in school. Hmm, something wrong and it needs fixing but first it helps when the people recognize that it's a major problem . One day at a time

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