A Healthy Muskogee?

In the recently released County Health Rankings from the University of Wisconsin, Muskogee County ranked 63 out of 77 counties in Oklahoma. Muskogee County sat in the bottom quarter for both Health Outcomes and Health Factors. There is a health problem in Muskogee County.

Muskogee County has been designated as a rural population with 43% of Muskogee County residents living in rural areas and as a result experiencing significant health disparities. The National Advisory Committee on Rural Health and Human Services has examined individual social determinants of health—poverty, access to services, economic opportunity, rates of chronic disease, homelessness, intimate partner violence, life expectancy— and found that rural communities often fare worse than their urban and suburban counterparts. 

Rural risk factors for health disparities include geographic isolation, lower socioeconomic status, higher rates of health risk behaviors, limited access to healthcare specialists and subspecialists, and limited job opportunities. This inequality is intensified as rural residents are less likely to have employer-provided health insurance coverage, and if they are poor, often are not covered by Medicaid. 

Muskogee County has a poverty issue as 21.1% of all residents, 29.4% of children under age 18, and 47.1% of adults age 65 and over live in poverty (US Census Bureau 2019 ACS 5-year estimates). Individuals and youth living in poverty are an underserved and high-need population, as poverty is a complicated issue affecting both mental and physical health. 

The MCSDOHC is focusing planning efforts on strategies and interventions that target rural residents and residents in poverty to achieve the goals of improving social determinants of health and reducing health disparities in several ways. First, because a large percentage of the county population is rural and/or in poverty, the developed strategies will be relevant to a high percentage of residents. Thus, future implementation of the strategies will have a positive health impact on a significant portion of the county’s population. Second, rural residents and low income households are at a much higher risk for chronic disease due to low access to quality health care, low community-clinical linkages, and low levels of social connectedness. Thus, there is a significant likelihood that interventions and strategies focused on these populations will result in a measurable decrease in health disparities in the county.