Local Health Departments (LHDs) are administrative unit of a local or state government, concerned with the health of a community or county. There are approximately 2,800 agencies or units that meet the profile definition of LHD. These LHDs vary in size and composition depending on the population they serve. However, all these communitybased agencies share a common mission of “protecting and improving community wellbeing by preventing disease, illness, and injury while impacting social, economic, and environmental factors fundamental to excellent health”. One of the ongoing challenge of a focus on community-level, population-based prevention is the manner in which local public health agencies have been funded. Most LHDs funding comes from federal funds, supplemented by state and local funds. Many of these funds come to LHDs through competitive grants programs. This study was therefore undertaken to investigate the sources of funding for the Local Public Health Agencies, according to geography specifically rurality. We utilized the data already compiled by the National Association of County & City Health Officials (NACCHO) in 2013. The population served by these health agencies were compared to the funding sources, and one –way ANOVA to estimate the significance between these variables. Our dependent variables were assigned to be the funding sources, while the independent variables were the two population categories –rural and urban. A categorical variable reflecting three levels of rurality was constructed using RUCA codes. “Urban” included census tracts with towns with populations >50,000. “Large rural” included census tracts with towns of between 10,000 and 49,999 population and census tracts tied to these towns through commuting. “Small rural” included census tracts with small towns of fewer than 10,000 population, tracts tied to small towns, and isolated census tracts. Furthermore, we also determined the proportion of revenue from these funding sources received by these three population groups. All analyses were completed using SPSS. There were no differences in the amount of revenues received by both the large and small rural and urban agencies from the State & Federal sources (p value = 0.182). However, urban agencies receive more funding from Medicare and Medicaid services (19.9%) compared to small rural with 6.9% (p<0.001). Comparatively, the amount of revenue generated by rural agencies is just a fraction of what the urban agencies generate. Residents of rural areas in the United States tend to be older and poorer, report more risky health behaviors, have more barriers to accessing health care, and have worse health status and health outcomes than do their urban counterparts. These rural LHDs have fewer resources and face strenuous challenges in carrying out their activities of keeping the community safe due to limited revenues. Until public health agencies are firmly connected to payment and funding mechanisms across the health system, communities, the overall health system and accountable care organizations will not see the true benefits of population-focused, community-based, prevention services.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ETSU/oai:dc.etsu.edu:etsu-works-8115 |
| Date | 01 January 2017 |
| Creators | Adeniran, Olayemi, Beatty, Kate E. |
| Publisher | Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University |
| Source Sets | East Tennessee State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | ETSU Faculty Works |
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