226620 Community Health Assessment via Social Determinants and GIS: Informing Policy for Community Health Equity

Tuesday, November 9, 2010 : 8:45 AM - 9:00 AM

Ryan Petteway, MPH , DrPH program, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, Berkeley, CA
Alisa Ames, MS , Office of Epidemiology and Planning, Baltimore City Health Department, Baltimore, MD
Caroline Fichtenberg, PhD , Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD
     
There is increasing recognition that health inequities can only be eliminated through action on the social determinants of health (SDoH). The Baltimore City Health Department is making a greater commitment to addressing SDoH, especially as part of community assessment. Particularly, focus has been on identifying inequities in the distribution of SDoH between communities, and how GIS might be used for assessment to guide/inform policy. Use of SDoH indicators such as poverty, income, or educational attainment offer little insight into what can be done—it's really more about the assets and resources that income and education afford and the threats they keep at bay. These assets and threats are often experienced at the community level, with lower SEP communities having a more unfavorable array of social and built environment factors. Thus, the key is identifying inequities in community social and built environment factors that are 1) immediately actionable by community members, and 2) modifiable via policy change.

The work presented here does this with local data on the food, alcohol, tobacco, and housing environments in Baltimore communities, and is part of work aimed at developing composite indicators of community health equity that can be used to plan, inform, and modify policy. The goal of this work is not only to assess community health equity, but to do so in a way that points to potential long-term solutions and highlights factors (known social determinants) that are immediately actionable. Maps and graphs will be presented.

Learning Areas:
Public health or related research

Learning Objectives:
• Discuss how to identify and incorporate appropriate social determinants indicators into the community assessment process for policy change • Describe a process for developing composite indicators of community health equity • Demonstrate knowledge of a social determinants of health model/framework

Keywords: Community Health Assessment, Geographic Information Systems

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: New Presenter. My focus is social epidemiology and I have the leading role at BCHD in work related to social determinants and health equity. I did analyses and mapping for the work to be presented, and am leading the development of a Social Determinants of Health and Health Equity report to be released in May. I am also a core member of the Baltimore Place Matters Collaborative, the Baltimore team for the national Place Matters Initiative out of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. I am co-leading the development of another SDoH and equity report and a web-based community health equity tool through my work with Baltimore Place Matters.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

Back to: 4014.0: Health Impact Assessments: A Tool for Social Justice