This month I am talking about county-wide health indicators. There are many different ways to measure this, and based on the Steuben County Health Assessment, I had thought that Steuben performed pretty well. Steuben has an aging population, which skews certain health measures (such as death rates), but in many areas, such as teen pregnancy, it seemed to be doing pretty well. As the report noted, "the teenage pregnancy rate from 2005 to 2007 for those 15 to 19 years old is 34.6 and lower than our regional rate of 47.1 and the NYS rate of 58.7."
I have recently been made aware of a website that attempts to comprehensively rank counties by health, County Health Rankings and Roadmaps. Like many global assessment tools, this weights different measures to come up with a comprehensive measure. I am a bit wary of these methods, as the weighting can largely determine the outcome. The US News and World Report college rankings are similarly criticized, as depending on the weighting, the rankings can completely change. I appreciate this site as it collects and displays commonly used and accepted health measures in a graphically accessible fashion, allowing a quick and convenient comparison between different counties.
However, there seems to be some issues with the data on this site. For example, it gives a teen birth rate of 30/1000 for Steuben, whereas the County Health Assessment gives a rate of 34, and it gives a NYS rate of 27, versus the report level of 58.7. I can not say definitively if this is not an issue of reporting period, but it seems off.
One area that certainly needs improvement is smoking. Steuben is reported with a rate of 28% - I do not know the source of this, but it is very high if it is accurate.
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