James Fuller reported in the Daily Herald Newspaper that DuPage County residents live in the healthiest community in the state. In fact, suburban collar counties took three of the top 10 ratings, according to new health rankings released this week.
Karen Ayala, executive director of the DuPage County Health Department, said the results are “especially gratifying” because it’s the first time DuPage has ranked No. 1 in both key measures of the rankings — Health Outcomes (how healthy we are) and Health Factors (how healthy we can be).
“The health department places a high priority on positively and effectively influencing the factors that affect the health of our residents,” Ayala said.
This is the seventh year the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and University of Wisconsin crafted the rankings. Data for the rankings comes from nearly 20 sources, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI and Census estimates.
Each year the foundation includes new factors and methodology that can dramatically change where a county ranks in relation to its peers, and remove the ability to maintain a strict apples-to-applies comparison from year to year. For this year, data on housing segregation among blacks and whites, drug overdose deaths and insufficient sleep patterns influenced the rankings.
DuPage Health Department officials said several recent initiatives help boost the county’s ranking.
Those include an unwanted-medicine collection program; the DuPage County Prevention Leadership Team, a coalition working to reduce youth substance use and increase mental wellness; and the DuPage Narcan program, which trains police officers on how to administer the opiate overdose reversal drug Narcan.
“We realize that within those programs, as well as many others, our success is due to the strong partnerships and collaborative approaches within DuPage County,” Ayala said. “These rankings are not the result of a single agency’s efforts, but rather the health care safety net systems that exist throughout our communities.”
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