Kane County health report shows room to improve

Kane County made significant strides toward becoming the healthiest county in Illinois in 2009, but a new report says too many residents are overweight, neglecting chronic conditions and ending up in the hospital more than necessary.

"Our community's health and our health as individuals is a huge piece of our quality of life," said Kane County Health Department Executive Director Paul Kuehnert in presenting the report Tuesday. "It results from the physical environment, social and economic factors, individual health behaviors and both access to and the quality of health care services."

The report tracks the county's progress in five priority goals:

Improving access to health care for the uninsured:

The marker the county uses for this goal is the rate of people hospitalized for diabetes. People with regular access to doctors are more informed about diabetes and how to care for it. The thinking is that knowledge keeps people out of the hospital. This is an area the county must improve in as diabetes hospitalization increased during the past five years. The hospitalization rate stands at nearly 152 people with diabetes out of 100,000 people. The county wants to lower that rate by a third. On the plus side, the number of Kane County residents with health insurance rose to 92.3 percent during the past 11 years

Eliminate disparity in infant mortality for blacks:

African-American infants in Kane County are twice as likely to die in the first year of life as babies of any other race. The county focused this past year on getting more African-American moms into prenatal care to detect and prevent problems early. Last year, the county successfully entered more than 80 percent of the African-American moms in its family case management program into prenatal care.

Reduce the level of chronic disease:

Smoking cessation and education campaigns knocked the percentage of adults who smoke in Kane County down to 14 percent, reaching a goal the county didn't expect to hit until 2015. The same can't be said of the midsections of Kane County adults. The county wants to shrink the local adult obesity rate to 14 percent. However, nearly 61 percent of the county's adults are now obese or overweight, and that number is rising.

Improve availability of mental health services:

The county uses depression as the key marker in this goal category, and it's proven to be a tough condition for the county to combat. Of particular concern is a recent survey that showed nearly 27 percent of high school students who reported feeling sad or hopeless. The county aims to cut that rate of depressed students to less than 15 percent.

Maintain core public health protection services:

The number of children receiving their standard set of immunization shots required in most schools is a key marker in this category. Kane County wants a least 90 percent of 2-year-olds to have shots for conditions such as polio, whooping cough and measles. Only about 74 percent of Kane County children age 19 to 35 months have those immunizations.