Shannon Nickinson
9,071 years.
That is what Escambia County lost in a year based on the health outcomes reported in by the University of Wisconsin and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
That measure – years of potential life lost before the age of 75 – is the bottom line of the county health rankings released March 25.
Many of the things that contribute to those lost years are things we do to ourselves.
Smoking, obesity among adults and children, lack of exercise, drinking too much (and driving afterward), sexually transmitted disease infections.
Dr. John Lanza, director of the Escambia County Health Department, says they use the county health rankings as a “call to action to continue our efforts in this generational, cultural change we need to be the healthiest county in the state.
“The answers to them are not necessarily obvious, it’s not one thing,” Lanza says. “It’s not just poverty. It’s poverty plus other issues.”
The Partnership For a Healthy Community works to enlighten the community about the toll those risky behaviors take not only on our individual health but also on our community’s prospects and potential prosperity.
In 2013, the Partnership published the area’s current Community Health Improvement Plan. It focuses on three areas – nutrition and physical activity, tobacco use and health access management.
But truly the way to get back some of those lost years is in changing the kind of community we expect to be, Lanza says.
The example he gives comes from a Sunday party he was at last summer.
Several of the other partygoers had come from Gulf Breeze across the Pensacola Bay Bridge to Pensacola for the party.
The talk turned to times when a wreck brings traffic on the bridge to a halt.
The talk Lanza heard was that those who might be stuck on the bridge with a cooler of adult beverages would just break them out and share them with fellow drivers while they waited out the traffic jam.
Turning the bridge into a big tailgating party.
Sounds cool? Not so much to the doctor.
“That’s not what we need to be doing in a situation like that,” Lanza says, adding booze to the bloodstream and then theoretically getting back behind the wheel.
“That’s not the community we want to live in,” he says. “We need to stop that.”
What does sound good to the doctor is creating a different kind of community.
One where “we expect to eat well and have access to healthy food, where we expect to have appropriate physical activity, where our kids graduate from high school and earn an appropriate living.
“A community where we all have the opportunity to find local employment in a job that pays benefits, medical and dental, such that these health factors can be addressed.”
That’s a community worth celebrating. Just what the doctor ordered.
Shannon Nickinson is the editor of www.progresspromise.com, a news and analysis website in Pensacola. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
