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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
Jay S. Buechner, PhD, Office of Health Statistics, Rhode Island Department of Health, 3 Capitol Hill, Room 407, Providence, RI 02908, 401-222-2550, Jayb@doh.state.ri.us and Elsie R. Pamuk, PhD, Office of Analysis, Epidemiology and Health Promotion, National Center for Health Statistics, 6525 Belcrest Road, Room 730, Hyattsville, MD 20782.
Eliminating health disparities is a major goal of Healthy People 2010 that will largely be addressed at the state and local levels. Special problems exist in using indices of disparity for monitoring at the state and local levels. These include small numbers problems, such as (1) the numbers of persons or events in one or more of the measured population groups may not support reliable measurement at the state or local level, and (2) the number of groups for which reliable measurement is possible may be different across indicators. As an example of the latter, mortality rates for heart disease may be measurable across all racial/ethnic groups, but mortality rates for suicide may not. Another concern is comparability problems, including those arising from (1) differences in demographic composition among the geographic areas (e.g., state to state, state to nation, locality to state) and over time periods being compared and (2) for indices calculated using targets, differences in the targets adopted by different jurisdictions for the same objective. This paper presents and discusses the special problems in measuring disparities and calculating indices of various types at the state and local levels and illustrates these problems with examples drawn from national data sources (e.g., mortality and natality data) analyzed at the state level. Because of the variety in population size and composition among the states, the findings from this analysis will also be generally applicable to many localities undertaking such measurement and monitoring activities.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Healthy People 2000/2010, Health Indices
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.