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The Office of Minority Health and Public Health Policy has released its 2008 Health Equity Report as a vehicle to:
- Draw attention to health inequities that exist in Virginia and to monitor their trends as the Commonwealth strives to eliminate them.
- Illuminate the inequities in health experienced by low income, racial and ethnic minority, and rural populations in Virginia.
- Demonstrate the associations between social determinants of health and health outcomes in Virginia and provide recommendations for reducing and ultimately eliminating these inequities.
Report Highlights
Poverty and Health in Virginia
- Income and poverty are strong predictors of health—they influence the resources and opportunities to be healthy.
- Neighborhoods with high levels of poverty are less likely to have opportunities to promote healthy lifestyles.
Life and Death in Virginia
- Death rates in Virginia increase as the concentration of poverty in communities increases.
- Immigrant groups, on average, have better health status than native born Americans. But this health advantage decreases the longer immigrants remain in the U.S.
- At all levels of education, African American women are more likely, 1.7 to 2.3 times, to experience an infant death.
- Hispanic women experienced the lowest infant mortality rates across all educational groups.
- African American children account for 47% of all children living in poverty in Virginia.
- Rural populations are more likely to live in high poverty census tracts than urban populations.
- Virginians with less than 12 years of education have an overall mortality rate that is more than twice that of Virginians with the highest level of education.
