Report to assess quality of life
Posted on Friday, June 20, 2008
SPRINGDALE — Northwest Arkansas needs more health-care data on its Hispanic and Marshallese populations to find its way during the next growth phase, community leaders said Thursday.
About 225 participants convened at the Jones Center for Families in Springdale to begin work on a community indicators report.
The report will focus on quality-of-life amenities such as medical and social services, arts and cultural activities, housing, education and the environment.
The idea is to create userfriendly data that government, grant providers, grant seekers, health-care providers and others can use when deciding what community services need help and which have made an impact.
“That way, they can see: Have we moved the needle ?” said Pearl McElfish, chief development officer for Northwest Arkansas Community Foundation, a chief organizer along with the United Way of Northwest Arkansas.
Kevin M. Fitzpatrick, director of the University of Arkansas’ Community and Family Institute, said similar community indicator projects have occurred elsewhere.
He cited one example, The Boston Indicators Project, which published its results on a Web site, www. tbf. org / indicatorsProject.
Others pointed to “dialoguesto-action” examples in Lynchburg, Va., and Jackson, Wyo., which took on race and immigration, respectively.
In Northwest Arkansas, the focus is on Washington, Benton, Carroll and Madison counties, but Thursday’s event drew participants from Newton and Boone counties as well.
The residents and community leaders broke into 11 groups on Thursday, which were asked to identify data that could be pulled together as a starting point.
Some organizers, including the Jones Center’s Kathryn Birkhead, said afterward it took some work for moderators to keep the eager participants from leaping ahead in the process.
“People were already starting to problem-solve,” McElfish told the crowd after they regrouped to report their progress.
In the session devoted to health care, Kathy Grisham, the executive director of Community Clinic of Springdale and Rogers, said Washington and Benton counties have some not-so-encouraging data and other numbers are missing entirely.
For instance, a 2006 Centers for Disease Control survey found the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers metropolitan statistical area has 80, 000 uninsured people.
But others have insurance they can’t use because of other barriers, she said.
For instance, between 6, 000 and 7, 000 children in Washington and Benton counties who have Medicaid insurance through the state’s ARKids First plan can’t find a primary-care physician who will accept them as patients.
“Which means they’ve got their insurance card — and no place to go,” Grisham said. That’s because doctors set limits on the percentage of Medicaid patients their practices will accept because its reimbursement rates aren’t as high as those of private insurers, she added.
Others in the group mentioned plans for studies to predict the extent of shortages of nurses, allied health workers, pharmacists and family practice physicians.
Grisham said the region has no health-indicator data — statistics on major diseases such as diabetes and hypertension — for its Hispanic and Marshallese populations.
“When we wrote a grant recently for the Marshallese, we had to use 1993 data from the World Health Organization,” she said.
The aging adults group reported a need for work-force data, such as the number of home health-care workers, and for a survey of the older adults themselves so needs assessments would be on target.
The housing group cited a need for definitions of homelessness and a fuller understanding of reasons for it. Its moderator, Hugh Earnest, said the area’s expensive vacant homes won’t help the problem.
“We don’t have a lot of houses in the $ 80, 000 to $ 120, 000 range, because our system has not been very efficient in producing those,” he said.
David L. Williams with the Psychiatric Research Institute of UAMS, said the new effort should model itself on decades of “hard infrastructure” leadership and vision that began a half century ago with establishment of the Beaver Water District.
The district was formed under Act 114 of 1957. Construction on Beaver Lake was completed in June 1966 and took the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers almost six years. The lake provides flood control, water supply to nearly 10 percent of Arkansans and hydroelectric power.
“It’s time to step back from this hard infrastructure focus, and take a pause,” Fitzpatrick said. “But let me say that when you talk about things like poverty, education, health and housing, they have hard-infrastructure implications —like transportation.”
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