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AUTHORS

Ruth Ann Norton, Green & Healthy Homes Initiative

Catherine Klinger, Green & Healthy Homes Initiative

Jamal Lewis, Green & Healthy Homes Initiative

Noah Goldmann, Syracuse University

*All rights reserved.

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The analysis will cover the six aspects of lead poisoning prevention listed below:

• Blood lead testing and screening
• Case management
• Environment investigations and housing inspections
• Enforcement
• Grant and loan resources
• Outreach and education

Each of the sections for the six topics covered include sub-sections detailing the state’s current resources and strengths, existing gaps, findings from the analysis and possible opportunities for improvement that can inform the Lead Commission’s and state and local agency strategies.

The post Maryland Lead Poisoning Prevention Asset and Gap Analysis Report appeared first on Green & Healthy Homes Initiative.

The goal of this publication is to disentangle the relationship between asthma and absenteeism, and to estimate the impact to which absenteeism negatively affects the student and her broader community. To illustrate the steps in analyzing this relationship, we use data from Grand Rapids, Michigan, a city where the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative (GHHI) has been working with local partners on a pediatric home visiting project.

The analysis finds that for some individuals, asthma may lead to chronic absenteeism (defined as missing more than 10% of school days) and failure to graduate from high school. As a result, those individuals pay the biggest price for their disease – future lost wages from the absence of a high school diploma total a present value of $745,000 over one’s lifetime. Federal, state, and local income tax revenue is thus reduced throughout the individual’s years in the workforce.

The post Asthma and Absenteeism: The Relationship Between Pediatric Asthma and Student Outcomes appeared first on Green & Healthy Homes Initiative.

GHHI worked with UMass Memorial Medical Center and the City of Worcester to improve operations and explore sustainable funding sources for their pediatric asthma program. This case study highlights one of their family’s stories.

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The post Lessons and Recommendations from Piloting Home-Based Asthma Programs appeared first on Green & Healthy Homes Initiative.

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The United States is in the midst of an unprecedented demographic experiment. The achievements of the past century—lower poverty rates, improved environmental regulations, higher educational attainment—have led to a remarkable growth in life expectancy. The average life expectancy for an American born in 1920 was 54.1 years. As of 2017, that number had risen to 78.6 years. This growth in life expectancy has been coupled with a steep drop in birth rates. In 1960, the fertility rate in the United States was 3.65 births per woman. By 2017, that number had fallen by more than 50% to 1.76 births per woman.

This transformational change in our country’s demographic profile—a growing elderly population paired with a stagnant youth and working age population— raises important challenges from a public finance perspective with warning signs already flashing in other advanced liberal democracies. In France, where the ratio of active workers to retirees has fallen from 4 to 1 in 1960, to 1.7 to 1 today, the longest strikes in 51 years have brought segments of the country’s economy to a halt as the Macron administration has attempted an overhaul of its 70-year-old pension system, which it argues is headed for large deficits. The challenge presented by a changing demographic profile in the US is particularly acute in the healthcare sector, which currently constitutes almost one-fifth of the nation’s GDP, and where annual cost growth has outpaced inflation for decades. As we consider our public policy priorities as a nation for the next decade, at the top of the list should be the question of how we can provide high-quality, personalized, empathetic care to a growing senior population, and do so in a way that is cost-effective and financially sustainable.

In evaluating healthy aging from both a public health and economic perspective, among the most expensive and life altering public health issues for seniors is falls. In the United States, 30% of adults over the age of 65 experience a fall annually. Falls are the leading cause of fatal injury and the most common cause of nonfatal trauma-related hospital admissions among older adults.

In purely financial terms, this translates to over $50 billion a year in direct medical expenditures. The indirect costs of falls for seniors—increased social isolation, reduced quality of life, increased risk of future health complications, and skyrocketing caregiver costs—are exponentially higher. While fall prevention is an enormously important public health issue in its own right, it is intimately tied to the concept of “aging-in-place”—the preference of the vast majority of older adults to “live in one’s own home and community safely, independently, and comfortably, regardless of age, income, or ability level.” Because the majority of falls take place in the home, effective aging-in-place and fall prevention programs are deeply intertwined.

Our goal with this paper is to explore pathways to sustainably fund programs that significantly reduce falls among seniors, allow them to gracefully age-in-place, and impact a range of other public health issues—such as social isolation—that are reaching epidemic proportions among elderly Americans.

Authors and Contributors: Adam Halper, Green & Healthy Homes Initiative (GHHI), Nina Creech, People Working Cooperatively (PWC), Ruth Ann Norton (GHHI), Michael McKnight (GHHI), Kiersten Sweeney (GHHI), Will Klein (GHHI), Daniel Son (GHHI), Kelsey McClain (GHHI), Ron Henlein (PWC), Aaron Grant (PWC), Sara Bourgeois (PWC) and Brad Staggs (PWC).

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