You probably won’t be the victim of a violent crime in Maine. You’re less likely now to be hospitalized for a condition that could have been caught earlier. And if you live in Oxford County, chances are you’re getting healthier.
But before you break out the low-carb champagne, there’s also this: Too few Maine toddlers are getting vaccinated on time. Whooping cough cases are high. When it comes to health, Mainers have lost ground to people in other states. And Androscoggin County has fallen behind most other counties in this state.
MaineHealth, Maine’s largest health system, released its 2014 Health Index Report on Wednesday. The report compiles new information from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s County Health Rankings, recent data from the United Health Foundation’s America’s Health Rankings and data from the MaineHealth system.
MaineHealth is the parent organization of a number of Maine hospitals, including Maine Medical Center in Portland, Franklin Memorial Hospital in Farmington and Stephens Memorial Hospital in Norway. St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Lewiston is an affiliate.
According to the 26-page report, there’s both good news and bad.
The good: Maine had the least violent crime in the nation, with 123 cases per 100,000 people. It had the second-fewest cases of chlamydia, with 257 cases per 100,000 people.
The bad: Maine ranked 44th for cases of whooping cough, with 55.5 cases per 100,000 people. The state with the fewest whooping cough cases had 1.6 per 100,000 people.
Maine also didn’t do well in getting toddlers all of their shots on time. Maine ranked 35th in the country, with 68 percent of young children getting a series of seven immunizations when they were supposed to. The best state had an on-time, all-immunization rate of 82.1 percent.
Cassandra Grantham, child health director for MaineHealth, said parents are largely postponing or rejecting vaccines for philosophical or religious reasons. Many are in affluent communities and communities that tend toward the naturalistic or holistic.
It’s a trend MaineHealth has been working to reverse, she said, by reaching out to parents at appointment time, educating families about the need for vaccines and sharing strategies with doctors’ offices.
Overall, Maine dropped from the 16th healthiest state to the 20th between 2013 and 2014.
Within Maine, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation named Sagadahoc the healthiest county and Somerset the least healthiest. That represents little change for either county. Sagadahoc has routinely ranked near the top and Somerset near the bottom of the foundation’s list for years.
However, Oxford County saw a significant change. That county, which ranked last or next-to-last for years, was 10th in 2014. This year it rose three spots to seventh place.
Community health leaders said the improvement is the result of years of collaboration, promotion and focus on healthful eating and physical activity throughout Oxford County.
“There has been a cultural shift,” said Patricia Duguay, executive director of the River Valley Healthy Communities Coalition, one of two Healthy Maine Partnerships programs in the county.
Jim Douglas, head of the county’s other HMP, Healthy Oxford Hills, agreed.
“I believe the improvements demonstrated in the County Health Rankings are the results of many, many diverse efforts having a collective impact,” he said. “Public health is everybody’s job, and I believe we understand that in Oxford County.”
Androscoggin County also saw a change in its rankings, but in the other direction. It slipped from seven to 13 in the past year.
“It’s something to be watching, for sure, not (something) to raise the alarms yet,” said Tim Cowan, director of the MaineHealth Index initiative and board member for Healthy Androscoggin, that county’s HMP.
In past years, Androscoggin County has ranked between 12th and sixth.
After analyzing the data, Cowan said Androscoggin’s rank fell this year, in part, because it saw an increase in the number of people who died under age 75. That bump happened after mortality rates dipped for a couple of years.
Androscoggin has one of the highest cancer rates in the state, with high rates of deaths due to lung cancer and other tobacco-related cancers.
Cowan said the county’s rank also fell because other counties simply improved faster, especially where the data involved babies born underweight.
He hoped the county rankings would spur discussion.
“We should be utilizing these data as they were intended by the people who create the County Health Rankings, and that is to get people’s attention,” he said. “It’s really intended to be a call for action, and that’s essentially what we do with the Health Index initiative.”
Franklin County’s rank also fell, slipping one place from eight to nine. It had been ranked eighth since 2012, but it was in first place in 2010 and second in 2011.
A spokesperson for Franklin Memorial Hospital, which oversees that county’s HMP, declined to comment on the ranking, saying the hospital did not have a chance Tuesday to go through the data.
The Health Index Report also looked at how Maine is doing with a number of goals MaineHealth set, including tobacco use, cardiovascular disease deaths, cancer deaths and preventable hospitalizations.
It found little change in tobacco use, with 20 percent of Maine adults smoking. That met MaineHealth’s 2016 target of 20 percent or less.
Deaths from cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks and stroke, decreased from 309 per 100,000 people in Maine between 1999 and 2001 to 196 deaths per 100,000 people between 2010 and 2012.
Although that didn’t meet MaineHealth’s target — fewer than 180 deaths by 2016 — Maine ranked ninth in the nation for cardiovascular deaths.
Deaths from cancer dropped from 211 per 100,000 people between 1999 and 2001 to 183 deaths between 2010 and 2012.
Although that met MaineHealth’s target — fewer than 185 deaths by 2016 — Maine ranked 40th in the nation for cancer deaths.
The report also showed that fewer Mainers were hospitalized for conditions that could have been prevented, dropping from 75 cases per 1,000 Medicare patients in 2000 to 55 in 2012. That met MaineHealth’s target of 58 or fewer.
How healthy is your county? Here’s how they rank:
1: Sagadahoc
2: Cumberland
3: Hancock
4: York
5: Lincoln
6: Knox
7: Oxford
8: Kennebec
9: Franklin
10: Washington
11: Penobscot
12: Waldo
13: Androscoggin
14: Aroostook
15: Piscataquis
16: Somerset
Source: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and MaineHealth’s 2014 Health Index Report
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