Investments in community healthcare and public health, unsurprisingly, has been linked to better health outcomes. But a new study from Health Affairs suggests that investments in non-health services -- K-12 education, libraries and housing, to name a few -- can improve outcomes as well.
As a benchmark, the authors used the County Health Rankings, a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. They found a significant positive correlation between expenditures and County Health Rankings for seven of the fourteen expenditure categories examined. Those were: community healthcare and public health, public hospitals, fire protection, K–12 education, corrections, libraries, and housing and community development.
The idea is that social spending has modest but detectable effects on population health, whether or not the spending primarily targets health.
A 10 percent increase in local public health spending has been linked with reductions in mortality of 1.1–6.9 percent. A long-term $10 increase in per capita public health spending has been shown to increase the proportion of people reporting that they are in good, very good or excellent health, and to reduce mortality by 9.1 deaths per 100,000 people.
[Also: Preventable death rates fall when communities expand population health, study shows]
The authors cite other studies that back up their overall assertion. One, addressing this topic at the state level, found that a higher ratio of social services to health spending was associated with better state health outcomes. Another state-level study found that higher overall welfare spending was also associated with better health outcomes.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Culture of Health Action Framework posits that getting and staying healthy requires addressing the "social and physical spaces and the conditions in which people live, learn, work, and play" in a community. With that in mind, the authors wrote that building a culture of health will therefore require engagement, planning and investment beyond the traditional focus on the healthcare sector.
Their bottom line: Communities and policymakers should consider not only the direct impacts of allocating public funds toward, say, a new library or park, but also whether these investments are likely to yield health benefits for the community.
Twitter: @JELagasse