Good Health Depends on More Than Great Doctors and Fine Hospitals
As mayor of Kansas City, Kan., Joe Reardon is justifiably proud of the University of Kansas Medical Center, which has trained several generations of physicians and nurses for more than 100 years. After all, the medical center is consistently rated as the best hospital and treatment center in the state, according to a popular ranking of health institutions. So when Mayor Reardon—who heads the government of both the city and Wyandotte County, in which it sits—first learned that Wyandotte had come in dead last among the state’s counties in a rigorous analysis of health measurements in 2009, he was shocked. “We have great access to excellent health care in a state where some counties have essentially no access,” Mayor Reardon says. “And we’re ranked last out of 105 counties? My first reaction was, ‘How could this be?’”
The answer, Mayor Reardon discovered as he delved into the statistics behind the claim, is that proximity to fine hospitals and first-rate doctors is only one of many factors—and not always the most important—determining how long people live and how vulnerable they are to serious illness. Evidence collected by public health experts over the past few decades repeatedly shows that less obvious forces, including proper diet and exercise, higher levels of education, good jobs, greater neighborhood safety, and underlying support from family and friends, provide a powerful, and often unappreciated, boost to a community’s health and well-being. By the same token, studies demonstrate, a poor showing in any of these areas can sink the health of individuals or of communities—even if they have access to topflight medical facilities.
The goal of the County Health Rankings project, which has given Wyandotte County low marks for health but high praise for its commitment to change, is to bring these hidden health factors to light and thereby help elected officials, civic leaders and community groups take concrete steps that can improve the health of local residents. The initiative originated at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, covering solely that state in 2003. A similar project began in Kansas in 2009, and in 2010 the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, N.J., provided funding so that the University of Wisconsin could expand its investigation to include within-state comparisons of counties in all 50 states.