Community Health Trends- Rebekah Glew

I was able to interview Pam Hatch, a Health Educator for the New Hanover County Health Department, located in Wilmington, North Carolina. She has worked in areas of health promotion, injury prevention, STD/HIV prevention, communicable diseases, and emergency preparedness. She was able to talk to me about the five biggest health trends and issues for Wilmington.
     The first one she mentioned was binge drinking and alcohol abuse. A recent study showed that Wilmington had higher rates of binge drinking and heavy drinking than the state rates for North Carolina. She contributes this to possibly being due to Wilmington being a college town with a college aged population. To combat this, there have been several programs targeting youth in hopes of preventing further alcohol abuse.
     Next, she addressed the issue of obesity. She shared some pretty scary statistics on this matter. More than 30% of youth under the age of 18 are defined as obese, and North Carolina is ranked 10th in the nation for obesity. This is probably due to poor eating habits and lack of exercise. Programs such as Eat Smart Move More and a promotion of Farmers' Markets were designed to help battle this issue. She also said that this particular issue is very heavily dependent on the community and the support they showed.
     Chronic diseases were the next issue she explained. The leading causes of death in the community are heart disease, diabetes and cancer. So far, interventions such as health fairs, promotion programs and preventative hospital tests. This is also a issue that is heavily reliant on community efforts.
     One of my least favorite things about Wilmington was how there were no sidewalks, leading into the next subject Mrs. Hatch described. Pedestrian safety is a huge issue in Wilmington. For this issue, the community has been able to come together to organize programs that promote safety, especially for occasions such as Halloween and busy school mornings. Furthermore, the Wilmington Urban Area Metropolitan Planning Organization has recently enacted plans for sidewalk improvement and educational awareness.
     One of the overall problems she described was a lack of youth prevention initiatives. This single issue is an underlying cause for many of the other problems in the community. However, some initiatory has been made by the Cape Fear Collation for a Drug Free Tomorrow to begin an evaluation of youth risk behaviors in Wilmington.
     She concludes by giving the top four things she feels could be done to best help the community fight these issues: 
1. Community cooperation and collaboration:

Better collaboration between community partners with more focused and direct efforts towards an issue. It seems like we have multiple organizations and efforts address the same thing and it would be advantageous to use resource together instead of separately.

2. Comprehensive Resource list:

With that being said, a comprehensive list of resources within our community needs developed to help eliminate duplication efforts and help in creating an awareness of resources availability to the community members (so they know where to go for what)

3. More joint efforts between county and city

4. More policies put in place to backup efforts addressing the community issues