U.S. Life Expectancy Rises, Health Disparities Increase
Last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) shared its review of Healthy People 2010. The report shared that as a Nation, we had met or were moving toward meeting, 71% of the disease prevention and health promotion objectives we set in 2000.
Despite this, the data also underscored the need for improvement in a number of critical areas, including health disparities and obesity rates. These two issues, as well as other key indicators of health, are top priorities of Healthy People 2020 (disclaimer: client).
“…Addressing health disparities continues to be our greatest challenge,” said Dr. Edward Sondik, Ph.D., director of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). “…All Americans should be concerned that disparities among people from socially, economically or environmentally disadvantaged backgrounds have generally remained unchanged.”
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Examining a 40-Year Spread in Life Expectancy Abroad
The October issue of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Bulletin is packed full of information on social determinants of health–including examples of work in progress and insights gained from around the world.
“Yes, there is a greater than 40-year spread in life expectancy among countries and dramatic social gradients in health within countries,” said Michael Marmot of University College London in his editorial. “But the evidence suggests that we can make great progress towards closing the health gap by improving, as the [World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health] put it, the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age.”
The bulletin includes another editorial that highlights potential solutions to improving the social determinants of health, as well as a number of research articles and relevant news.
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An Agenda for Fighting Disparities
What are the Occupy Wall Street protests all about? Author Geoff Livingston describes its as a “groundswell of economic injustice.” Playing a role behind the scenes in economic and social injustice are social determinants of health and health disparities. Perhaps it’s time to bring them to the forefront.
The October issue of Health Affairs presents an agenda on fighting disparities. In it, Dr. Howard Koh, Assistant Secretary for HHS, discusses a key part of this agenda, HHS’ National Action Plan to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. Analysis and commentary on how health reform may impact health disparities is also provided. What might be most surprising is that one research study included in the issue, shares that only 59% of Americans are even aware that health disparities exist!
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No Black-White Health Gap in Canada Says Study
Meanwhile, our friends in Canada may be one step ahead. According to a recent study and as reported in BET, “blacks are equally healthy as their white counterparts.” BET went on to say:
“Thomas A. LaVeist, a co-author of the study and director of the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions in Baltimore says that he believes America’s history of treating Blacks as second-class citizens plays a large role in the Black-white health disparity that exists in the U.S.”
As a heads up, LaVeist also cautions taking the results at their surface as the the results could have significant limitations because the survey included just 729 Blacks, compared with more than 280,000 whites reported BET.
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Health is About More Than Healthcare
LaVeist also published another study about how place–and not necessarily race–contributes to health disparities. The study, based on a neighborhood in Baltimore composed equally of whites and blacks, found that within the integrated community, health disparities all but disappear. This suggests that as a Nation, we’ve been looking for answers on how to improve health the wrong way. Instead, we should be looking at what’s going on in certain communities that what’s going on within certain populations. As quoted in the Atlantic:
“Solutions to health disparities are likely to be found in broader societal policy and policy that is not necessarily what we would think of as health policy,” LaVeist says. “It’s housing policy, zoning policy, it’s policy that shapes the characteristics of communities.”
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flickr credit: woodleywonderworks
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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is inviting us to submit our comments and suggestions as part of the collaborative process for Healthy People 2020. Every 10 years, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leverages scientific insights and lessons learned from the past decade, along with knowledge of new and emerging issues, data, trends, and innovations to set the nation’s health priorities.
- If you care about your community’s health, our waters and our forests, then you can submit public comments to the current draft objectives on the Healthy People Public Comment Page.
- If you care about nutrition, obesity and physical activity, then you can submit public comments to the current draft objectives on the Healthy People Public Comment Page.
- If you care about chronic diseases, including prevention, treatment and cures, submit public comments to the current draft objectives on the Healthy People Public Comment Page.
- If you care about these and many other issues, then you can make a difference by submitting a comment to the Healthy People 2020 objectives.
Submit a Public Comment
Your participation will shape Healthy People 2020 and the nation’s health agenda. Since public comments go on the record, you will have contributed to setting our nation’s health objectives.
- Submit a public comment to the current draft objectives on the Healthy People Public Comment Page.
- Grab a Web badge to show you care about the Healthy People 2020 process.
Stay Involved and Informed
For more information and to stay updated:
- Subscribe to the Healthy People listserv for the latest information on Healthy People 2020 and to receive e-mail notices of related news, events, publications, and more!
- Join the Healthy People Consortium to become an active supporter of Healthy People.
More About Healthy People
Since 1979, Healthy People has set and monitored national health objectives to meet a broad range of health needs, encourage collaborations across sectors, guide individuals toward making informed health decisions, and measure the impact of our prevention activity. The Healthy People process aims to be inclusive and its strength is directly tied to collaboration.
Since its inception, Healthy People has become a broad-based, public engagement initiative with thousands of citizens helping to shape it at every step along the way. Drawing on the expertise of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for 2020, public input and a Federal Interagency Workgroup, Healthy People 2020 will provide a framework to address risk factors and determinants of health and the diseases and conditions that affect our communities–and in effect move us toward a healthier nation.
Disclosure: ODPHP is a client that I work with at IQ Solutions. However, I genuinely feel that Healthy People 2020 plays an important role in setting our Nation’s health agenda and even contributed comments myself, especially when it comes to chronic diseases and health communications.
Our brothers and sisters across the pond are onto something – and it’s called social marketing. Though the practice has been around since the late 1960s, the U.S. and other nations have been slow to adopt its methodology.
On Monday, the BBC published an article that highlighted findings from a study, Kicking Bad Habits, conducted by the King’s Fund that calls for new ways of thinking when it comes for public health – specifically, more social marketing. In short, the King’s Fund study enforced what many of us in both the U.K and increasingly so in the U.S. is that what we have been doing to address health isn’t working, and that more social marketing may be the answer. Quote:
- “Social marketing techniques and data analysis tools like geodemographics should be used to identify, target and communicate messages designed to motivate people to change how they live.”
- “And public health programmes should not rely on just one approach…as the evidence shows the most effective interventions employ a variety of tactics.”
- “The methods used to promote public health need to be more modern, using the most advanced techniques and technologies.”
- “We need social marketing techniques to target messages and understand what will make changes worthwhile for people but also we need to make sure the healthy choices are the easy choices.”
You can download the full results from the study here. This article further re-enforces why the U.K. created the National Social Marketing Centre. Once I got beyond my own excitement that 1) social marketing was being covered by mainstreams media and 2) that the use of the term “social marketing” was applied correctly (i.e. –> NOT confused with social media), I started to analyze what this means.
I wasn’t alone. Social marketing great Alan Andreasen brought the article to the attention of the social marketing list serv. A member of the King’s Fund responded to the article on the list serv backing the application of social marketing. Social marketer Craig Lefebvre blogged his response to the post as well. Hallelujah!
So, SB, what does this mean? It means the time is now. If a similiar study was conducted in the U.S., I agree with Lefebvre that we’d probably find similiar results. What we are doing isn’t working. Taking a serious look at social marketing and fully integrating it into our activities, I think, would bring about much of the ‘change’ that is a-buzz this year.
As I shared on Craig’s blog, I feel social marketing truly can and does provide an umbrella for people with various expertise across a range of fields to approach public health and well-being. Won’t you join us?
To those on board in the U.K, know we are all watching, here to support and hope a similiar initiative develops here in the U.S. Perhaps an international social marketing association would help? (Hey, it’s at least worth another plug right?)
(digg the BBC’s original article here)
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As they say, ‘Hindsight is 20/20.’ However, social marketing thought leader extraordinaire and fellow social marketing blogger at On Social Marketing and Social Change, Craig Lefebvre, is hoping that the future of health policy will be ahead, rather than behind the curve. Lefebvre launched a new blog series titled ‘Healthy People 2020,’ and invites you to participate. Lefebvre writes:
If you haven’t heard, the process of developing the nation’s health objectives for the next decade has started – and you and your readers could become part of the conversation. Healthy People 2020 is the next update of the objectives that have guided our country’s health promotion and disease prevention efforts for the past 25+ years.
As part of my work with ODPHP, I am hosting a series of guest blogs on how people envision the interactions of health communication, social marketing, and health information technology – including social media – in improving the Nation’s health in the next decade.. The first topic is Information Rx for Healthy People in 2020 by Joshua Seidman from the Center for Information Therapy.
Due to the limited resources to take HP 2020 to a greater level of participation, Lefebvre hopes to garner participation through the use of social media to help spread the word and generate the conversation. For more information and to see the latest post in the series contributed by Cynthia Solomon titled Personal Health Records for All, and add in your thoughts.
Lefebrve said he welcomes inquiries, post contributions, and cross-post opportunities. Lefebrve’s blog is where talking about health and inspiring people to get involved in national health promotion and disease prevention policy meet.