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January
21, 2004
Little
Rock -- Wouldn’t you want to know if your child were playing with matches near a can of gasoline? Arkansans are—to varying degrees—playing with fire every day because some of our behaviors are hazardous to our health. St. Vincent Health System, the Arkansas Department of Health (ADH), and The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta are working with local officials in Pulaski County to identify health risk factors like cigarette smoking, health insurance availability and lack of physical activity. In fact, a tried and true survey will be launched February 16, 2004 by telephone in Pulaski County.
Four thousand adult residents of Pulaski County will participate in the County Adult Health Telephone Survey according to Dr. Fay Boozman, director, ADH and Stephen Mansfield, President and CEO, St. Vincent Health System. The survey is a product of The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and provides statistical data on issues such as health status, tobacco and alcohol use, diabetes, immunizations, women’s health, prostate and colorectal cancer screening and physical activity, among others. Data collected from the survey will be used to develop and enhance community health planning at the local level.
The Adult Health Survey will allow Pulaski County to be compared to the state and national Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System compiled by the CDC and ADH. “We’re truly excited about this survey,” Boozman and Mansfield said. “We encourage Arkansans to participate when called. It’s important to know the health of the people in your county. Survey results will help us get grant money and fine tune the health services we provide.”
Currently, most health risk behavior data are collected at the state level.
The Pulaski County Survey will have enough respondents to allow use of zip code data to compare different parts of the county and identify problem spots.
These data will be useful to other health and human services organizations and agencies wanting to know more about the people they serve in Pulaski County. Organizations will be able to target their financial and staffing resources to the areas in the county that will benefit most, obtain a baseline for evaluating the success and failure of their efforts to impact health, and determine best practices.
The actual telephone survey will be conducted by professionals at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Institute of Government Survey Research Center. The data will be provided to the Arkansas Center for Health Statistics (ADH) and provided to Pulaski County Hometown Health Coalitions. All surveys will be confidential. Phone numbers will be erased from the records. Information will never be traced to individuals. The survey takes approximately 15 minutes to complete.
The local survey was first done in Baxter County in 2000. Residents of the Baxter County Hometown Health Coalition wanted to determine the specific health needs in Baxter County and plan for future health initiatives. They learned that 52 percent of residents over 50 years of age had not had colorectal screenings. The Baxter County Hometown Health Coalition did a county-wide push to get as many adults as possible screened and discovered seven persons that had either colorectal cancer or precancerous lesions.
The Arkansas Department of Health and St. Vincent Health System are currently working with community Hometown Health Coalitions. With the complete survey data, each of these coalitions will be able to customize health care plans for their own neighborhoods.
Funding for this project was secured through a $45,000 grant from Catholic Health Initiatives Mission and Ministry Fund secured by St. Vincent Health System. An additional $66,340 was secured through a ADH Preventive Block Grant, the ADH AIDS/STD program and the ADH Central Health Region.
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