Measuring up
Graphic courtesy of COUNTY HEALTH RANKINGS & ROADMAPS Shoshone County’s 31 percent obesity statistic falls short of the nation’s and the state’s average percentage of 28 percent.
Well, Shoshone County, your overall high school graduation rate is something to hang your hat on…
That’s about where the positives end though regarding the overall health of our county, so says a study on health and environmental factors within counties in every state.
The eighth annual County Health Rankings, released on March 29 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute (UWPHI), have given Shoshone County its bottom of the barrel ranking based how it stacked up to the other 42 participating Idaho counties in five main categories including health outcomes, health factors, clinical care, social & economic factors, and physical environment.
For those who know that Idaho has 44 counties, not 42, population health analyst at the University of Wisconsin, Anne Roubal, explained to the Coeur d’Alene Press that “Clark and Camas counties are unranked, because we did not receive values of premature death for these counties.”
She added, “Counties were not ranked if they had a missing value for premature death, or if they had an unreliable value for premature death and no other measures of morbidity were available.”
The study was not too kind to our slice of North Idaho, showing several areas in these main categories that the county needs to “explore” or work on, and few that were areas of “strength.”
So that we can end on a positive note, let’s start with the bad.
Regarding the Health Factors category (in which we rank 41 out of 42), the percentage of smoking adults (16 percent), obese adults (31 percent), physically inactive adults (28 percent), and alcohol-impaired driving deaths (56 percent) are all well above the state averages they are compared to.
These poor areas are a tough pill to swallow, considering that the county’s only area of “strength” in this category is the percentage of the population that has adequate access to physical activity (92 percent).
This would suggest that even though many have access to physical activities, they are not taking advantage of them.
Sitting all the way at rock bottom, Shoshone County’s Social & Economic Factors category is dead last in the state.
Troubling areas with statistics such as 7.7 percent unemployment, 30 percent of county children in poverty, 353 reported violent crimes (per 100,000 population), and 137 deaths due to injury (per 100,000 population) were the heavy hitters that brought the county down.
The few positives in this category include a high number of individuals with membership to social associations (12.1 per 10,000 population) and a strong combined high school graduation rate (89%).
The only overall categories Shoshone County ranks semi-well in are Clinical Care (ranked 24 overall) and Physical Environment (rank 13 overall), and even these ones have areas that could use improvement.
The study states that the county could use improvement in the areas of uninsured residents, ratio of population to primary care physicians, and mammography screenings in the Critical Care category.
The County’s uninsured rate of 16 percent could be better, but is identical with the state’s average.
The ratio of 2,480 people to one primary care doctor and only 44 percent of Medicare enrollees ages 67 to 69 receiving mammography screenings on the other hand fall significantly below the state average.
As promised, the high note of the report for Shoshone County is its Physical Environment.
Having no indicated areas that need immediate improvement, the report shows that our air pollution (measured by the average daily density of fine particulate matter in micrograms per cubic meter- PM2.5) is lower than the state’s average at 6.6 compared to 7.2.
In overall ranking, Shoshone County only beat out our southern neighbor, Benewah County, who ranked last.
To see the full report, visit www.countyhealthrankings.org.
Wednesday: See part two of this article where The Shoshone News-Press will reach out to members of the community for comment and see what is being done to fix the areas that the study says need attention.