Geography as a Risk Factor: Effective Use of GIS to Reduce Teen Pregnancy

‘Hot-spot’ maps increase their usefulness when they move beyond surveillance to inform health prevention strategies and accountability for achieving results. The Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina (APPCNC) is one of nine demonstration sites for The President’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative. APPCNC works in partnership with Gaston County North Carolina to implement this multi-component, community-wide demonstration project. Prior to the demonstration project, maps were used as a surveillance tool but not for targeting prevention services. This poster will illustrate how the project used hot spot maps to target recruitment for evidence-based sexual health education programs at community sites.  By engaging both the county health and planning departments as key stakeholders, detailed census tract maps were produced for the 13 tracts with the highest rates of teen birth.  The maps included markers for churches, parks and recreation facilities, shopping malls, apartment complexes, and other locations where program partners were able to recruit youth.  The evaluation then examined the extent to which youth who enrolled in programs were from the high-risk census tracts.  The poster will show the progression of engagement with community agencies to produce the maps, dissemination of the maps to critical intervention partners, and use of the mapping information to evaluate program reach.  Throughout the timeframe of the project, teen birth rates decreased by 29%. The poster will present descriptive statistics that illustrate the project’s contribution to the decrease in rates by monitoring saturation in the 13 census tracts.