The Delta is consistently ranked as one of the worst areas in the country for illnesses that result in early mortality. To put it in perspective, one report estimates there were nearly 18,000 excess deaths in the Delta in 2004, "deaths that would not have occurred had the region achieved the average rate of mortality experienced by the remainder of the nation."

 

A new report from the Special Task Force for Revitalization of the Mississippi Delta Region lists removing health disparities as one of four major goals needed to revitalize the Delta and move the region forward economically.

 

"Poor health conditions severely limit worker productivity and overall business development," stated the report "A Time of Reckoning, Testing the Will for Change in the Mississippi Delta," published in June. "The Mississippi Delta region must address existing gaps in access to care, health education, and risk behaviors," according to the report.

 

The death rate from heart disease in the Mississippi Delta is more than 45 percent greater than the U.S. average. The teen birth rate is the highest in the country.

 

"Just pick a metric and the Delta region will either be last in those that they want to be higher in, or first in those that they want to be lower in," said Pete Walley, director of the Mississippi Bureau for Long-Range Economic Development Planning.

 

The old model of health and economic development revolved around the idea that the health sector provided good paying jobs and stable employment. As such the health sector was a contributor to the overall economy and increasingly has been "recruited" as part of economic development efforts.

 

"No thinking individual will argue that the health sector does not contribute to the economy of a particular geographic area like the Delta," Walley said. "But that is not the whole story. Recent research has proposed the idea that the health sector, rather than just being valued for the output produced by health care expenditures, is an effective input into the economic system."

 

Walley said, in effect, health becomes a form of capital much like business working capital and health expenditures become investments. If the health of the workers and their families is important, then direct investments in health will yield economic improvements.

 

Research done by Dr. Arthur Cosby, director of the Social Science Research Center, Mississippi State University, has demonstrated that economic development is closely associated with better health.

 

"Economists have pretty much established that the causal relationship between health and wealth goes both ways," Cosby said. "Healthier people tend to be more productive and can produce more wealth. People who are wealthier tend to be healthier. It can also spiral down. If you have less wealth, people are less healthy."

 

The health community and economic development community often aren't very engaged with each other.

 

"They don't interface," Cosby said. "It you go to a health meeting, there are few economic development people. If you go to an economic development meeting, there are few health people."

 

Cosby advocated more interactions between the economy and health arenas. You see this in some of the larger corporations now that have health and wellness programs for employees.

 

"Somehow that same type of thinking needs to get over to more general society," Cosby said.

 

Better cooperation between businesses and the health care community would be helpful. But it may take much more than that to start the upward spiral needed to lift the health and economy of the Mississippi Delta.

 

"I think something transformational has to happen in the economy of the Delta, something really, really fundamental," Cosby said. "For example, it could be the new green economy people are talking about. The Delta could be the place for this because of the soil, the water and weather. Perhaps the Delta could be the great generator of biofuels. It could be a little Houston, Texas, but in a green area rather than petroleum. That would be transformational economic change."

 

Task Force member Rep. John Hines, who represents Washington County, agrees about the importance of links between the economy and health.

 

"A healthy workforce is necessary to any industry," Hines said. "It is a burden on industry when there is not a healthy workforce. Health insurance costs are higher and workers are out more days for sick leave."

 

Hines said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recognized the problem with health disparities and is funding some programs to address that. But another important effort recommended by the Task Force is an increased focus on health awareness and education.

 

"We need to catch children at a young age and train them to have a healthier lifestyle," Hines said.

 

The report advocates school-based health programs that introduce children and parents to the need for healthy eating and physical activity as steps towards preventing problems like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

 

An example of such a program is in the Poplarville Special Municipal Separate School District in Mississippi, which pooled funding from two foundations to incorporate a healthy lifestyle curriculum into the K-12 curriculum of three rural school districts. The program helps students devise plans with wellness trainers and then trains 600 teachers and educational support staff to serve as fitness role models.

 

Another Task Force member, L. Ray Humphreys, CEO of Delta Regional Medical Center (DRMC), said with the challenges of the rising cost of healthcare, it is more important than ever to eliminate healthcare disparities in the Delta.

 

Humphreys said DRMC is actively engaged in many of the steps that have been recommended to address the health problems. In fact, DRMC was one of 10 hospitals across the country that participated in a 29-month study called "Expecting Success: Excellence in Cardiac Care," aimed toward developing solutions to racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare in the U.S.

 

"We would encourage all healthcare providers to join together to remove these disparities to improve healthcare throughout the Delta," Humphrey said. "The findings from Expecting Success will allow us to serve as a leader in our community, sharing the initiatives we have developed and implemented here at DRMC with our state's other hospitals to work toward resolving healthcare disparities among minority populations."

 

Expecting Success worked closely with teams from each grantee hospital and assessed each site in terms of its readiness for change, and in creating an improvement plan to guide its activities improving cardiac care. Sites also received training in creating and using uniform methods to collect and submit standardized race and ethnicity specific data including the metrics used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Hospital Quality Alliance. Through Expecting Success, surveys of patient experiences were also collected and analyzed.