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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
Daniel H. Freeman, PhD, Office of Biostatistics, University of Texas Medical Branch, 700 Harborside Drive, 1.134 Ewing Hall, Galveston, TX 77555-1148, (409) 772 6355, dfreeman@UTMB.EDU
Objective: Reporting of quantitative indicators of the health, behavior and safety of children is a key step in the community health improvement process. Synthetic estimators are usually employed for local area planning. It was hypothesized that specific local data could be obtained through local collaborations and accessing public data bases on the Internet. This study reports the development of community report cards for children in a city of about 60,000.
Method: Community coalitions set policy, agreed upon criteria and assembled data for the report card.
Results: Five annual report cards have been released. These have evolved based on the requests of policy makers. Specific changes included adoption of CDC's YRBS methodology by the local school district, increased focus on immunizations by the local medical center, health district and civic organizations, re-evaluation of the effectiveness of the county's prenatal care program, and identification of Healthy People 2010 goals as specific criteria for local program evaluation.
Conclusions: Policy makers at the local level can change their perceptions of their own community when they had access to local, believable, comparable and useful data.
Learning Objectives:
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.