In rural health, location matters

When it comes to your health, place matters. If you live in a rural county, the bottom-line truth is that you’re less apt to be healthy than if you lived in a more urban one. A couple of recent reports shed some light on both the issues and potential solutions.  According to the 2018 County Health Rankings, published by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in partnership with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, rural counties continue to lag behind more urbanized ones in factors that play a critical role in a community’s overall health. These include child poverty, low-birthweight babies and teen birth rate. But rural communities have within their DNA the resources to rise to these challenges.  In another report, titled “Exploring Strategies to Improve Health and Equity in Rural Communities,” researchers at the University of Chicago’s NORC Walsh Center write that while much of the research exploring rural health issues in the U.S. focuses on disparities – increased health risks “related to geographic, socioeconomic, environmental and other factors” – seldom is attention paid to the strengths and assets within these communities that can be, and often are, deployed to improve health.