Scott County has ranked last again in an annual report comparing Indiana counties’ health outcomes.

The report, published by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, ranked heath behaviors such as unemployment and smoking rates and measured how these rates affected length and quality of life in Indiana and across the country. Co-director of the study and professor at the University of Wisconsin, Julie Willems Van Dijk, says that her team looked at a range of factors beyond what most would consider typical health factors to develop their rankings.

“We don’t just mean access to and quality of medical care, and that’s what a lot of people think when they hear the word health,” she says. “We look at a much more broad view of health because we know to have long quality lives, which is what we measure in our health outcomes ranking that you must not only look at access to medical care, but also at health behaviors, at social and economic factors, and the physical environment in order to have a really comprehensive view of the many factors that determine how long and how well we live.”

Van Dijk says that the best way for communities to use this information is to look at data to find gaps in coverage and then take action to fix things most important to the community. She also says that it’s important to know that comparing data from this year to previous years won’t be useful because the data is relative.

“If you’re rankings go down, it doesn’t mean your health is getting worse,” she says.

Chair of the Department of Applied Health Science at the Indiana University School of Public Health, David Lohrmann says that beyond county rankings, Hoosiers need to look at the bigger picture of health across the nation.

“You can be a healthy county within your state, but how does your state rank within the country? And Indiana doesn’t do very well,” he says.

According to other reports, Indiana is the seventh most obese state in the nation and is fifteenth in its rate of overdose deaths.

Van Dijk and Lohrmann agree that it’s local communities that will have to make changes to impact their citizen’s health. Lohrmann says improving health in the community can yield many more benefits.

“When the community figures out the well-being in the entire community, the foundation is that population health. And then they make it a priority and activate around that, a lot of other good things happen too,” he says.

Our guests:

Julie Willems Van Dijk, Co-Director of the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps Program, University of Wisconsin

David Lohrmann, Chair of the Department of Applied Health Science, IU School of Public Health

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