DuPage, Kendall residents area's healthiest
Health in the suburbs is much better than the rest of the state, a national analysis found, but researchers found troubling discrepancies among the collar counties.
DuPage County ranked second in the state, behind only Kendall County, in overall health. McHenry, Lake and Kane counties all ranked in the top 11 in this category, which includes life expectancy and quality-of-life measurements. Will County ranked 17th.
DuPage, Lake, McHenry and Will counties also ranked in the top 10 out of the state's 102 counties in the second major category, which measures factors that go into determining the health of a community. Among them: behaviors such as smoking, exercise and diet; access to health care and quality of care; social and economic factors including education, income and community safety; and the physical environment, including pollution.
But Kane County dropped to 19 in such health factors. Cook County ranked a dismal 81 in overall health and 59 in health factors. Researchers did not break out suburban Cook County measurements.
Downstate Hardin County was ranked least healthy in Illinois.
The findings were released Tuesday by the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a health care research and advocacy group.
Researcher Pat Remington, associate dean of public health at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said many factors go into discrepancies between counties, and health providers and patients should try to find out where problems exist and what can be done to improve the situation.
Care, pollutionMost suburban counties ranked in the bottom half in environmental health, which measures air pollution judged by days with unhealthy levels of ozone and particulates, as well as physical environment, such as the ratio of grocery stores to liquor stores.McHenry County ranked 70, Lake 82, DuPage 83, Kane 84, and Cook 100 out of 101 counties, primarily due to pollution from traffic and industry. (Pope County was not ranked due to limited data.) Will County ranked 32.In clinical care, Kane County ranked 41 and Will County 51 - behind even Cook County at 28 - which includes the percentage of residents without health insurance, the number of primary-care doctors, and Medicare quality measures for those 65 and over, such as hospitalizations for preventable conditions like asthma and diabetes.Quality of healthOne area where the collar counties did not do well was in morbidity - quality-of-health measures such as incidence of low-birth-weight newborns and surveys in which residents report poor mental and physical health.Low birth weight and lack of health insurance are particular problems in urban areas including Chicago, Waukegan, Elgin and Aurora, Remington said. Amy Poore, spokeswoman for the Cook County Public Health Department, said it was difficult to comment on the findings because the department serves only the suburbs, which were lumped together with Chicago for the study even though they have very different characteristics.Officials from the collar counties' health departments declined to comment until today, when the raw data is released to further explain the rankings.While many areas of the suburbs do well in measures like life expectancy, Remington cautioned that they face other less obvious problems with quality of life."People in suburban America clearly have problems with quality of life, like stress, depression and mental illness, that aren't limited to urban communities," Remington said. "It's good for people to think about mental health or substance abuse issues in communities that might otherwise be fairly affluent."This should really begin a dialogue on how to provide better health care."The online report is available at www.countyhealthrankings.org.