The seventh edition of the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps has been released. County Health Rankings & Roadmaps is a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. The Rankings are based on a model of population health that emphasizes the many factors that, if improved, can help make communities healthier places to live, learn, work and play. Rankings include over 30 measures of local level data encompassing issues including education, income, transportation, housing and more. New measures included in this release are: Frequent physical distress; Frequent mental distress; Drug overdose deaths-modeled; Insufficient Sleep; Residential segregation-black/white and Residential segregation-non-white/white. None of these measures are included in the calculating of a county’s ranks but, along with the other Additional measures, they provide data that may be very germane to a particular county. A Key Findings from the release includes rural counties have had the highest rates of premature death for many years, lagging far behind other counties, and on top of that, premature death rates are now getting worse for 1 in 5 rural counties.
Read more: http://www.countyhealthrankings.org