Finding and Using Local Health Statistics to Inform Library Services

Posted by Emily Hamstra on February 7th, 2022 Posted in: Health Disparities, Health Equity, Public Libraries

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Diving into the statistics about health in your state, county, or city can give you essential information about common health issues in your area. Health statistics can inform your programming, services, and library collections and can help you to accurately describe the health information needs of your community when advocating for new services, marketing services and programs, applying for grants, and more.

Below are a few resources for finding statistics on health in your area. Quick searches in these resources will provide you with information to better understand health, socioeconomic issues, and health disparities in your community. This is not an exhaustive list of resources, simply a starting place. You might also find additional information is available from your local public health departments and hospital systems.

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Health Statistics

State

• County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, State Reports: provides an overview of key health indicators and outcomes by state
• Rural Health Information Hub: a wealth of information about rural health issues. The state guides list key health issues and statistics about hospital and healthcare access

County

• County Health Rankings & Roadmaps: a great place to start looking for county health statistics, provides an overview of key health indicators and outcomes by county
• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Mapping Medicare Disparities: statistics about health care services and costs, insurance coverage
• IHME’s County Health Profiles: similar to County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, but provides additional disease-specific statistics by county

Food Access, by County

• Food Access Research Atlas: from the USDA Economic Research Service, this resource maps data about access to supermarkets and food resources by county
• Feeding America, Map the Meal: provides statistics about food insecurity and food costs by county and district

City

• City Health: provides statistics about life expectancy, children living in poverty, obesity and more for 750 U.S. cities (population 50k+)

Demographic Information

• Atlas of Rural and Small Town America: from the USDA Economic Research Service, provides demographic data, county classifications, jobs, veteran status, and more, with a special focus on rural areas
• Census.gov: extensive resource for current and historical U.S. demographic data
• MLA Language Map: information about languages spoken in each U.S. county. (Do you have health information available in your library in the languages spoken in the community? Health Information in Multiple Languages is available from MedlinePlus.gov

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After doing a few searches in these resources, ask:

• Does my library’s collection include information about the key health conditions prevalent in the community?
• Where can I find reliable information about these key health issues?
• Who in my community is working on the issues I identified through searching in these resources? How might I partner with them?
• Are there programs I can host in the library to address what I’ve learned from these resources?

Network of the National Library of Medicine provides funding for programming, collections, and services that encourage use of reliable health information and address issues in community health. When applying for funding, the resources from this blog post can be used to describe the need for the funding in your community. Funding announcements from NNLM Region 5 are posted on the NNLM.gov website. Additional guidance on applying for funding is available through the 2-hour (free) course Grants and Proposal Writing.

This post was adapted from a lightning talk presented by the author at the Association of Rural and Small Libraries Conference, 2021.