Freeborn County ranked 66th out of 84 Minnesota counties measured for overall health outcomes, according to a national county-by-county health ranking published Monday by the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute.

While the county is in the bottom half of the counties measured for the third year in a row, its rank has improved by two positions from 2011.

“I’m just thrilled that we moved up two,” said Ellen Kehr, former Statewide Health Improvement Program director for Freeborn County. “That means we’re controlling and making a positive impact on the things that we can.”

The ranking used a standard formula to measure how healthy people are and how long they live, according to a Minnesota Department of Health news release. The document compares counties within each state. There are 87 counties in Minnesota, but three were not measured.

According to the report, Steele and Carver counties are the healthiest counties in Minnesota, while the least healthiest are Mahnomen and Cass counties.

The report ranks “health outcomes,” or how healthy a county is, and “health factors,” or what influences the health in the county.

The health outcomes rank is made up of a mortality rank, including the rate of people dying before age 75, and a morbidity rank, which includes measures of self-reported fair or poor health, poor physical health days, poor mental health days and the percent of children born with low birth weights.

The health factors ranking is based on four factors: health behavior, clinical care, social and economic factors and physical environment. Each of these factors contains additional issues that the report studied.

 

Why the rank?

Kehr said Freeborn County’s ranking is affected by issues such as accessibility, what types of industries are here and the age of the county’s population. Even the county’s higher teen birth rates — affected by decreased access to resources such as Planned Parenthood — play a part, she noted.

Freeborn County Public Health Director Sue Yost agreed.

“You need to think about the community as a whole,” she said. “It’s everything that plays into it.”

She, too, noted that the county’s higher elderly population plays into the county’s numbers

Another category she pointed out is one regarding access to healthy foods. To have access to healthy foods, a person needs to be within 10 miles of a store. That’s difficult to do in Freeborn County since the only grocery stores in the county are in Albert Lea, Yost said.

The rankings fail to factor stores in communities not far over the county lines, such as Austin, Wells, New Richland and, in Iowa, Lake Mills and Northwood.

The rankings also added a category about fast food restaurants, which stated that 48 percent of the restaurants in Freeborn County are fast food restaurants.

“There’s a lot of things in here, too, that we as Public Health can’t have an effect on,” Yost said. “We can try to do all the education on smoking, obesity, drinking, etc., but it’s got to be up to the individual person who’s making that decision.”

She said she hopes people will use the data as their planning different activities.

“Just to know that there’s room for improvement, and remember that it’s important to think that the whole community has to play in on this,” Yost said.

In 2010, Freeborn County ranked 61st for health outcomes and 64th for health factors. In 2011, it ranked 68th for health outcomes and 69th for health factors; the latest report ranks the county as 66th and 70th, respectively.

It did not indicate what years or in some cases how the data was collected.

 

Specifics of the report

According to the report, Freeborn County ranked 56th in its mortality rank and 73rd in its morbidity rank.

In the category called health behaviors — which addresses adult smoking and obesity, excessive drinking, motor vehicle crash death rates and teen birth weights — the county ranked 76th.

For clinical care — which addresses the number of uninsured residents, primary care physicians, preventable hospital stays and diabetic and mammography screenings — Freeborn County ranked 53rd.

For social and economic factors — which includes education, employment, income, family and social support and community safety — Freeborn County ranked 63rd.

For physical environment, which looks at measures of environmental quality, the county ranked 38th. This is an improvement from 2011, when the county was ranked 74th.

Minnesota Commissioner of Health Ed Ehlinger said the rankings remind health officials of the importance of prevention efforts.

“We spend only a fraction of the amount on prevention that we spend on medical care in this country,” Ehlinger said. “We need to do a better job of investing in disease prevention within communities if we really want to improve the health of Minnesotans and get a handle on rising health care costs.”

He said he hoped public health officials would use the rankings as a tool to improve health.

To view the full report, go to www.countyhealthrankings.org/minnesota.

 

County rankings

Southern Minnesota counties
The following are rankings of health outcomes and health factors for nearby counties:
• Blue Earth: 29, 42
• Faribault: 65, 68
• Freeborn: 66, 70
• Mower: 46, 58
• Olmsted: 23, 1
• Steele: 1, 29
• Waseca: 24, 47
• Winona: 20, 37

Northern Iowa counties
The following are rankings of health outcomes and health factors for nearby Iowa counties, out of 99 Iowa counties measured:
• Winnebago: 76, 19
• Worth: 5, 32