Manatee Ranks in Top Third of Florida County Health Rankings

LAKE WORTH –  The Florida Public Institute today released the state’s 2011 County Health Rankings, calling on ”non-traditional“ partners to work with the local public health community to improve Florida’s health statistics. Manatee County ranked 21 of Florida's 67 counties, while Sarasota was named 4th on the list.

The second year of the Rankings, a national project by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin, showed Florida’s rural counties overall rank lowest in the areas of Health Outcomes and Health Factors.  Only 20 percent of the Health Factors are determined by access to and quality of clinical care.  The remaining measures of the health are based on health behaviors,  including tobacco use, diet and exercise, binge drinking, rates of sexually transmitted disease and teen-age pregnancy rates; social and economic factors such as level of education, unemployment and income; and environmental issues such as the ratio of recreational facilities to population and air quality.

”As we can see from the rankings, the work that our county health departments are doing outside of the clinical setting is vital, but they can’t do it alone,“ Dr. Claude Earl Fox, Executive Director of the Florida Public Health Institute said.  ”We need non-traditional partners, like the business community and organizations of faith, must take an active role.“

One of the most sobering aspects of the Rankings, Dr. Fox said, is the three- to five-year lag in the data collected to rank the counties.

”We haven’t even begun to see the impacts of the recession on our health outcomes,“ Dr. Fox said.  ”But we are certainly experiencing them on the front lines of public health.“

More information about the County Health Rankings may be found at www.countyhealthrankings.org.