A jogger runs along the coastline on a chilly morning, Tuesday, December 1, 2020, in San Rafael, California. (Sherry LaVars/Marin Independent Journal)
The Marin County Public Health Department has created an internet dashboard that shows health disparities among county residents.
This dashboard is part of a larger effort to improve health outcomes for Marin's minority communities.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has ranked Marin County as the healthiest county in the state in 13 of the past 14 years. In 2017, it fell to second place behind San Mateo County.
“Our county has the highest life expectancy in the world at approximately 85 years, which is why we consistently rank near the top in county health rankings,” Dr. Matt Willis, Marin County's public health officer, told the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. Ta.
“But,” Willis said, “we also stand out in something we're not proud of: We have the greatest disparity in life expectancy among communities in Marin County.”
For example, Willis pointed out that Ross has the highest life expectancy in Marin, with residents living an average of 91.9 years. Marin City has the lowest life expectancy in the county and is home to the largest percentage of Marin's African American population. The average life expectancy there is 77.1 years.
Willis unveiled the new dashboard during the Oversight Committee's workshop on the 2024-2025 budget. He said the idea for the dashboard was sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“What we found was that communities have been differentially impacted by the pandemic in terms of infection rates, access to testing, and access to vaccines,” Willis said. “This has created a new part of our public health infrastructure called community response teams.”
The county fielded four teams. One is a team for interaction between Marine City and the rest of southern Marin. The other is an area that includes San Rafael's Canal District and other areas of the city, which are primarily populated by Latinos. Some teams in Novato, which has a significant Latino population. The other focused on western Marin, which has a significant number of Latino farmers.
Local nonprofit organizations lead each community response team, which is comprised of at least 10 partner agencies. These agencies include other nonprofit organizations, schools, community clinics, faith-based organizations, businesses, and government agencies.
“Community response teams are networks of community-based leaders who best understand their communities and can be the most effective strategic partners in bridging the gap,” Willis said.
Vaccination rates among Marin's African American residents remain low despite the county's efforts to make vaccinations as convenient as possible, including sending mobile clinics to Marin City early in the pandemic. It remained.
“We need to understand how we feel about vaccination because it influenced the Tuskegee experiment and so many other things,” said the nonprofit Marin, the lead agency for vaccination. said Jermea Reynolds, executive director of the County Collaborative Team. Southern Marin Community Response Team.
A decades-long collaborative research project between the U.S. Public Health Service and Tuskegee Institute began in 1932. In the experiment he had 600 black men participate. Of these, 399 had syphilis and 201 did not have syphilis. Although penicillin had become the treatment of choice by 1943, men infected with syphilis were not offered any effective treatment for syphilis during the study period.
As a result, some participants died, went blind, went insane, and experienced other serious health problems due to untreated syphilis.
“We were in the middle of a pandemic, so this was all new to us,” Reynolds said. “There was some suspicion, like, 'What's going on?'
Reynolds helped write a research paper about the efforts of the Southern Marin Response Team in Marine City during the pandemic. The paper was published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and later accepted into the National Institutes of Health Library.
This paper identifies the partnership between response teams and Marine City churches as one of the keys to relative success.
“It's definitely made a big difference, mainly because churches are seen as safe places,” Reynolds said.
“It took a lot of empathy, trust, and grace to work together to achieve our goal of getting more people vaccinated,” said the Rev. Floyd Tompkins of St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Marin City. ” he said.
Currently, 12.9% of Marin's African American population has been vaccinated against COVID-19. This is higher than the 9.3% of the Latino population, but remains much lower than the 33.4% of Marin's non-Latino white population.
Willis said there are other reasons why other minorities in Marin are hesitant to get vaccinated.
“We found that fertility concerns were more common among Latinos,” he said. “The community response team working in the canal included young women who lived in the area and were able to directly address these concerns. There was a general distrust.”
Each community response team receives $150,000 annually. The funding was provided by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. This law will be repealed at the end of June.
“Health and Human Services is seeking continued funding from the county because this is an effective new structure to drive government and community action,” Willis wrote in an email.
The team meets every two weeks and goes beyond responding to the pandemic to work on overdose prevention, disaster preparedness, and access to services like CalFresh and MediCal.
“We are currently strategizing how to address the fentanyl crisis in addition to diabetes,” Reynolds said.
The new dashboard focuses on four areas within the same county as our regional response teams. The dashboard allows a user to see the census tracts within his four zones. In addition to information on life expectancy, it also provides data on mental health, drug overdoses, heart attacks, falls among older adults, and a number of socio-economic measures.
“We need to see the gaps before we can close them,” Willis said.
