Interactive Tool Provides Snapshot of Health Disadvantages in California Communities

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The conditions in which you live, learn, work, and age affect your health.

The Public Health Institute’s (PHI) Public Health Alliance of Southern California collaborated with health departments across the state of California (38.8% Latino), developed the new California Health Disadvantage Index to look into these social, environmental, economic, and political factors, called social determinants of health.

“The Health Disadvantage Index provides a fine-grained illustration at a geographic level that makes sense to the decision makers that have the greatest ability to impact these social determinants: local elected officials, planners, engineers, investors, NGOs and others,” says Tracy Delaney, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Public Health Alliance of Southern California. “By connecting something like employment data to health, we can communicate that addressing root causes like unemployment and housing can ultimately improve health outcomes.”

Addressing root causes of health outcomes is particularly important to reduce health disparities which disproportionately burden Latinos. Latino families living in disadvantaged areas face inequity in access to safe, quality places to live, work, learn, play, pray, walk, and eat.

This tool can help non-traditional partners-anyone not working directly in public health, like elected officials, employers, developers, transportation planners, housing authorities, etc.-to see how their projects, programs, and policies affect equity in access to healthy resources, thus affect the community’s health.

Learn more about the Health Disadvantage Index here.

Community Commons also provides valuable interactive mapping to tools to look at social determinants of health.

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