VCU news

By Frances Dumenci

A new study by researchers at the Virginia Commonwealth University Center on Human Needs shows that communities of color, high poverty and low educational attainment in Bernalillo County, N.M. have reduced life expectancy and increased exposure to environmental hazards.

In collaboration with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Health Policy Institute and the Virginia Network for Geospatial Health Research, the VCU Center on Human Needs is releasing the fourth of eight studies assessing population health inequities and related social and economic conditions in urban and rural communities across the United States. Working alongside the project partners are eight “Place Matters” teams consisting of individuals who work and live in each of the communities studied.

The fourth report examines health disparities for Bernalillo County, home to the city of Albuquerque. The community team in Bernalillo County was interested in studying the relationships between exposure to environmental hazards, community conditions and health; looking to uncover how social, economic and demographic factors are related to health outcomes in their area.

The technical report by the VCU Center on Human Needs, which is part of the VCU School of Medicine, has been translated into a policy brief that has been issued by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Health Policy Institute. Read the policy brief here.

“The Bernalillo County Place Matters team has been working on health equity and environmental justice for a long time. The data in this report are intended to help them better educate the public and local decision-makers about the issues facing the community,” said one of the  authors of the study, Amber Haley, a research epidemiologist at the VCU Center on Human Needs.

“As with the prior reports from this project, the research conducted in Bernalillo County was not conducted solely for academic purposes but also as a tool for concerned community members.  Our goal is to inform decision-makers about the importance of community conditions in shaping health outcomes,” said Haley.

The VCU team examined the community characteristics associated with health outcomes and life expectancy. They observed that non-Hispanic white communities and communities with low poverty rates and a highly educated adult population had fewer environmental hazards, better health outcomes and longer life expectancies than communities with a larger minority population and greater prevalence of poverty. Location has such a significant impact on health that life expectancy within the county varies by more than 22 years across census tracts.

According to Haley, the Bernalillo County analysis showed that neighborhoods with fewer environmental hazards and lower community risk indexes – calculated by census tract based on average educational attainment and standardized test scores, the violent crime, foreclosure and unemployment rates and certain household characteristics – enjoy higher life expectancies than other neighborhoods in the county.

In addition to the reports already released for San Joaquin Valley, Calif.; New Orleans, La.; and Cook County, Ill., in the next several months, the VCU Center on Human Needs will be releasing studies of other communities, including Oakland in Alameda County, Calif.; Boston, Mass.; Baltimore, Md; and South Delta, Miss.

The project was funded by a subaward from the National Institutes of Health. The Health Policy Institute was the prime and also receives funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for the Place Matters initiative.

Haley collaborated with colleagues at the VCU Center on Human Needs, including the lead author, Emily Zimmerman, Ph.D., assistant research professor; Steven Woolf, M.D., M.P.H., director of the Center on Human Needs; and Benjamin Evans, M.H.S.A., policy research manager.

Subscribe to the weekly VCU News email newsletter at http://wp.vcu.edu/vcunews/ and receive a selection of stories, videos, photos, news clips and event listings in your inbox every Thursday.