Population Health Web Ramble
Paper details:
This exercise gets you exploring web-based data and doing a quiz. It is designed to get you familiar with some health measures, get you making comparisons of health status of various countries, and beginning to question why the observed inequalities persist. Doing all this web work can take some time that can be broken up into short periods. Take notes of your observations and the questions that come to mind. It is challenging for those learning about health care to try to make sense of this material which deals with health.

This exercise gets you exploring web-based data and accessing readings, as well as watching a documentary. It is designed to get you familiar with some health measures, get you making comparisons of health status of various countries, and beginning to question why the observed inequalities persist. Doing all this web work can take some time that can be broken up into short periods. Take notes of your observations and the questions that come to mind.

Start with Population Health Forum’s website http://depts.washington.edu/eqhlth/ (Links to an external site.)

(Links to an external site.)Link on the left to the Unnatural Causes website and take the Health Equity Quiz from the right lower quarter panel. Remember your score. Note that the answers refer to almost a decade earlier for some questions.

US County Life Expectancy Trends

Go to US Health Map (Links to an external site.) http://vizhub.healthdata.org/us-health-map/ Choose the Life Expectancy Tab at the top. Select female at the bottom and click on the Value (or Change) buttons to the left of the year range. When clicking on Value, click on the right directed arrow to the left of the gender selection. You can watch trends over the 25 year period. If you click on a particular county on the map, you can see bar graphs of the county life expectancies in that state to the upper right, and if you click on the name button you can hover the cursor over the bars to see values for named counties. For Value, you see the range from lowest to highest and can hover over the cursor. There are trends for the selected county in male and female life expectancy on the lower graph. Explore this for places you are familiar with. Also find the counties with the highest and lowest life expectancies (life span) and note the differences. Some of those life expectancies compare with the best in the world while others with quite low ones. You can also explore other indicators at the county level. If you click on the Change button at the bottom of the map, you can see where life span is increasing or decreasing over those 25 years. You might look at which counties have seen the biggest increase or decrease in length of life for women. On the right bar graphs you can see what is happening to both men and women in that county. Speculate on why this is happening.

International Mortality Data Comparisons

Go to Mortality Visualization (Links to an external site.). http://vizhub.healthdata.org/mortality/ Select 45q15 results at the top. This indicator represents the probability of a 15 year old dying before reaching age 60 separately for men and women. For General Settings, the years typically span from 1970 to 2014. Choose Prob.: Group Min-Max. Compare the US with other countries such as Western Europe nations, Japan, Australia, Cuba and Sri Lanka by choosing them in the left under Top Chart Settings. You can remove (x) or add countries (cursor in the space there and countries appear grouped geographically. You see the legend for the curves on the right for the graphs at the top for both. Next at the top choose 5q0 results which is the under-five (child) mortality rate. There are graphs presenting the breakdown of this five year span but don’t focus on them. Similarly don’t focus on the world map below.

Ask yourself why are we dying so much more in the prime of life?

SUBMISSION: Write up what you found and present your reactions to this exercise in a one or maximum two pages. Include one illustrative graph that you produced. Use a 12 point standard font and single or double-spacing. Make sure every file you submit to the website for an assignment has your last name and date in the file name. The preferred format for file name would be: DoeJPopHealthWebRambleYYMMDD (where the surname is Doe, first initial J, YY is the last two digits of the year, MM is the month number, and DD is the day.