[ Report] World Happiness Report 2015

From the report (The 2015 World Happiness Report and supplemental files are available for download for free at this link)

The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness. The first report was published in 2012, the second in 2013, and the third on April 23, 2015. Leading experts across fields – economics, psychology, survey analysis, national statistics, health, public policy and more – describe how measurements of well-being can be used effectively to assess the progress of nations. The reports review the state of happiness in the world today and show how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness. They reflect a new worldwide demand for more attention to happiness as a criteria for government policy.

The report is published by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN).  It is edited by Professor John F. Helliwell, of the University of British Columbia and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; Lord Richard Layard, Director of the Well-Being Programme at LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance; and Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Director of the SDSN, and Special Advisor to UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon.

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Background

The world has come a long way since the first World Happiness Report launched in 2012. Increasingly happiness is considered a proper measure of social progress and goal of public policy. A rapidly increasing number of national and local governments are using happiness data and research in their search for policies that could enable people to live better lives. Governments are measuring subjective well-being, and using well-being research as a guide to the design of public spaces and the delivery of public services.

Harnessing Happiness Data and Research to Improve Sustainable Development

The year 2015 is a watershed for humanity, with the pending adoption by UN member states of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September to help guide the world community towards a more inclusive and sustainable pattern of global development. The concepts of happiness and well-being are very likely to help guide progress towards sustainable development.

Sustainable development is a normative concept, calling for all societies to balance economic, social, and environmental objectives. When countries pursue GDP in a lopsided manner, overriding social and environmental objectives, the results often negatively impact human well- being. The SDGs are designed to help countries to achieve economic, social, and environmental objectives in harmony, thereby leading to higher levels of well-being for the present and future generations.

The SDGs will include goals, targets and quantitative indicators. The Sustainable Development Solutions Network, in its recommendations on the selection of SDG indicators, has strongly recommended the inclusion of indicators of Subjective Well-being and Positive Mood Affect to help guide and measure the progress towards the SDGs. We find considerable support of many governments and experts regarding the inclusion of such happiness indicators for the SDGs. The World Happiness Report 2015 once again underscores the fruitfulness of using happiness measurements for guiding policy making and for helping to assess the overall well-being in each society.

 

[Press release] Distrust of police is top reason Latinos don’t call 911 for cardiac arrest

Distrust of police is top reason Latinos don’t call 911 for cardiac arrest.

From the 4 December 2014 EurkAlert

WASHINGTON – Fear of police, language barriers, lack of knowledge of cardiac arrest symptoms and financial concerns prevent Latinos – particularly those of lower socioeconomic status – from seeking emergency medical help and performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), according to a study published online yesterday in Annals of Emergency Medicine (“Barriers to Calling 911 and Learning and Performing Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) for Residents of Primarily Latino, High-Risk Neighborhoods in Denver, Colorado”).

English: CPR training (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Residents of low-income, minority neighborhoods have two strikes against them: the incidence of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is much higher than average and rates of bystander CPR are below average,” said lead study author Comilla Sasson, MD, PhD, FACEP of the American Heart Association and the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora, Colo. “We need to do a better job of overcoming the significant barriers to timely medical care for Latinos suffering cardiac arrest. Culturally sensitive public education about cardiac arrest and CPR is a key first step.”

Researchers conducted focus groups and interviews with residents of primarily lower-income Latino neighborhoods in Denver to determine why they underutilize 9-1-1 emergency services and how to increase knowledge and performance of CPR on people suffering cardiac arrest. General distrust of law enforcement, of which 9-1-1 services are bundled, was cited as a top reason for not calling 9-1-1 by most participants.

Many subjects also believed – incorrectly – that they would not be able to ride an ambulance to the hospital without first paying for it, as that is the practice in Mexico where many participants came from. Subjects also expressed a lack of understanding about the symptoms of cardiac arrest and how CPR can save a life. Strong reticence about touching a stranger for fear that it might be misconstrued was a unique cultural barrier to performing CPR. Language barriers – either with 9-1-1 dispatchers or first responders – also inhibited subjects from getting involved with someone experiencing cardiac arrest.

In the interest of educating more people on how to perform CPR, participants widely supported policy changes that would make CPR either a high school graduation requirement or a pre-requisite for receiving a driver’s license.

“Future research will need to be conducted to better understand how targeted, culturally-sensitive public education campaigns may improve the provision of bystander CPR and cardiac arrest survival rates in high-risk neighborhoods,” said Dr. Sasson.

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Annals of Emergency Medicine is the peer-reviewed scientific journal for the American College of Emergency Physicians, the national medical society representing emergency medicine. ACEP is committed to advancing emergency care through continuing education, research, and public education. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, ACEP has 53 chapters representing each state, as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. A Government Services Chapter represents emergency physicians employed by military branches and other government agencies. For more information, visit http://www.acep.org.

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[Press release] Zip code better predictor of health than genetic code

Zip code better predictor of health than genetic code | HSPH News | Harvard School of Public Health.

From the 4 August 2014 Harvard School of Public Health News item

In St. Louis, Missouri, Delmar Boulevard marks a sharp dividing line between the poor, predominately African American neighborhood to the north and a more affluent, largely white neighborhood to the south. Education and health also follow the “Delmar Divide,” with residents to the north less likely to have a bachelor’s degree and more likely to have heart disease or cancer.

Pointing to Delmar as an example, Melody Goodman, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, recently spoke to a Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) audience about the links between segregation and poor health. An HSPH alumna, Goodman gave the keynote address at the first annual symposium sponsored by the Department of Biostatistics Summer Program in Quantitative Sciences. She told the audience at the July 24, 2014 event, which was held at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, “Your zip code is a better predictor of your health than your genetic code.”

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[Reblog] Harsh socio-economic conditions affect the genetic health of children

Write text here…

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Patrick Mackie

Environmental health practitioners, particularly those who studied and qualified in the last twenty years, will be very familiar with Margaret Whitehead and Göran Dahlgren’s model of the social determinants of health, shown below in the well-known model from their 1991 publication.

Environmental health as a profession works at the interfaces between, generally, people’s living and working conditions and their health and wellbeing. But these are only one set of environmental factors that affect health in terms of morbidity and mortality, and there are other governmental and social actors that can work together to intervene and change the outcomes for real people in the real world. That’s why the new public health arrangements in England are game-changing for the profession and for the health of the public generally, and that’s why finding an evidence-base to target suitable and effective interventions that will really make a difference for people is so important.

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[News article] Heart attacks hit poor hardest

Heart attacks hit poor hardest.

From the 8 January 2014 ScienceDaily article

As people get older, their bodies wear down and become less resilient. In old age, it’s common for people to become “clinically frail,” and this “frailty syndrome” is emerging in the field of public health as a powerful predictor of healthcare use and death.

p. 50 of The 2012 National Healthcare Disparities Report
http://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/nhqrdr/nhdr12/2012nhdr.pdf

Now researchers Vicki Myers and Prof. Yariv Gerber of the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at the School of Public Health at Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine and colleagues have found that poor people are more than twice as likely as the wealthy to become frail after a heart attack. The findings, published in the International Journal of Cardiology, could help doctors and policymakers improve post-heart-attack care for the poor.

“By defining frailty, which combines many areas of medicine, we can predict which people are at the highest risk after a heart attack,” said Ms. Myers. “And we found a strong connection between frailty and socioeconomic status.”

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Read entire article here

Related Resource

National Healthcare Disparities Report (NHDR)

• 2012 Web Version | PDF Version [  – .8.74 MB] | State Snapshots
   

  For the tenth year in a row, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has produced the National Healthcare Quality Report (NHQR) and theNational Healthcare Disparities Report (NHDR). These reports measure trends in effectiveness of care, patient safety, timeliness of care, patient centeredness, and efficiency of care.
  New this year are chapters on care coordination, and health system infrastructure. The reports present, in chart form, the latest available findings on quality of and access to health care.
  The National Healthcare Quality Report tracks the health care system through quality measures, such as the percentage of heart attack patients who received recommended care when they reached the hospital or the percentage of children who received recommended vaccinations.
  The National Healthcare Disparities Report summarizes health care quality and access among various racial, ethnic, and income groups and other priority populations, such as residents of rural areas and people with disabilities.

   

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[Repost] You Are What You Eat, and You Eat What You Earn

From the November 2013 Bloomberg article

There are plenty of reasons why Americans eat the foods they do, but two of the most important factors in determining diets are income levels and education.

An analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture reinforces the notion that high earners with college degrees are more likely than other Americans to eat a healthy diet. In the opposite corner, lower-income Americans without high school degrees are more likely to drink whole milk and eat beans cooked with animal fats. Still, it’s hard to explain the divide between orange juice (high-income college grads), apple juice (low-income college grads), and whole oranges (low-income, less than a high school diploma).

Social Factors May Affect Lifespan More Than Race, Location

Study finds work, education have greater impact, By Robert Preidt in the  Tuesday, April 17, 2012 article at HealthDay

A group of socioeconomic factors such as education, income and work are better indicators of your chances of living to age 70 than race or geography, a new study shows.

The findings challenge the long-held belief that race or the region of the country where you reside are the best markers of how long you may live, according to researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, Calif.

Previous research has found large differences in life expectancy in various regions of the United States. For example, people tend to die younger in large urban areas and in the South. A study published last year found that men in five counties in Mississippi lived an average of 66.5 years, several years less than the national average of 75.4 years for men.

Racial disparities also are a well-established factor in life expectancy. For example, a recent study found that white men live an average of about seven years longer than black men, and white women live about five years longer than black women, according to a Stanford University news release.

In the new study, the researchers examined data on the probability of survival to age 70 for people in counties across the United States. The data was initially categorized according to sex and race, but the researchers then considered how other factors affect life expectancy.

The analysis showed that when factors related to local social conditions — such as education, income, and job and marital status — are included, health differences based on race and region virtually disappear….

 

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• Stanford study: Social factors better indicate early death risk than skin color, geography (eurekalert.org)
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