The 300-plus page Chatham County Community Assessment isn’t light reading, but perusing it and considering its findings is worth your time. And because it highlights some of the most significant challenges faced by the county and its residents, it’s worth paying attention to.
The Assessment is published every three years. It’s a collaborative project of the Chatham Health Alliance, the Chatham County Public Health Department and Chatham Hospital and serves, among other things, to document the well-being of Chatham County and its residents.
It’s an invaluable tool that identifies pain points, if you will, in the county — areas and aspects of life in Chatham where hardships happen. It helps officials in health-related fields understand the needs that exist in the community, the underlying factors contributing to problems and the availability of resources to make improvements.
The full report can be found on the county’s website at https://www.chathamcountync.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/60843. We encourage you to read it; in the meanwhile, here are some of the more notable findings in this most recent Community Assessment — most of which, if you’ve read previous Assessments or have been paying attention to what’s happening here, are disappointingly familiar:
• the COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacted the health and well-being of Chatham and its residents in a wide variety of ways
• systemic racism, a historic problem that has persisted in many ways, continues to drive health inequities here
• priorities identified in earlier Community Assessments — key challenges targeted in earlier studies — remain concerns. Among them: access to health care, healthy eating and active living, and economic resilience
• Chatham’s robust growth and development, while creating a myriad of economic opportunities, will also create its own unique set of challenges
Data findings from research done in preparation for the report plainly show that, despite the high quality of life in Chatham County, too many of its residents face areas of distress. Among the most significant of those:
• 3 in 10 households face barriers to proper health care
• about 1 in 10 residents don’t have health insurance. Those numbers are skewed heavily by non- and foreign-born citizens (58% and 39%, respectively) and those living in poverty (25%)
• 1 in 11 adults don’t have a health care provider, mostly because of lack of health insurance — meaning, when they got sick, they have no regular provider to turn to for care
• significant financial stresses are real for many residents. One in three say lack of money is a primary source of stress. Nearly 8,000 live at or below the national poverty line, with Black/African American and Hispanic/Latinx residents making up a disproportional number (four times as likely as others) of those
• healthy living is still an obstacle, with more than one-third of residents dealing with obesity or weight issues (34%, up from 29% in 2018), and with 32% of high school students overweight. Not engaging in exercise or physical activity is far too common, with two-thirds of residents saying they’re either too busy or too tired to do so
That’s a lot to be concerned about, and that’s just the key findings. The Chatham Health Alliance, according to the Assessment, has identified three areas of strategic focus for its subcommittees right now: mental health and substance abuse, transportation, and employment.
Among those, the mental health indicators in Chatham are the most troubling. Mental health indicators, perhaps as expected, worsened since the 2018 Assessment. The percentage of residents reporting “high” levels of day-to-day stress and those who report “fair” or “poor” mental health increased marginally, but the number of residents experiencing anxiety or depression jumped significantly, from 20% to a full one-third (33%). Drug and alcohol use is up, as are unintentional overdose deaths, which have jumped “substantially.”
Clearly, there are opportunities for improvement, particularly in the gaps between Chatham’s “haves” and “have nots,” and for those residents who willingly, or through circumstance, make (sometimes exceedingly) poor choices.
The Assessment is, in some ways, a health “report card” for the county and its people. As stakeholders, we should all know what it says. The News + Record will be following up on the report with a series of related stories about its findings; stay tuned.