Local Healthy Maine Partnership
making a positive difference
To the editor:
Healthy Aroostook, your local Healthy Maine Partnership, works to create healthy communities and reduce the risk of chronic disease which frequently 1) reduces quality of life, 2) decreases an individual or family’s ability to contribute to the overall economy, and 3) increases costs to employers due to lost productivity, and increased health care costs.
Healthy Aroostook collaborates with partners across Aroostook County in five areas including tobacco, physical activity, nutrition, substance abuse and chronic disease, building partnerships that allow us to create sustainable systems-level changes in our communities that have real and lasting impact in our fight against chronic disease and its associated costs. Such examples include helping small and large Maine businesses make their employees healthier, creating tobacco free environments, increasing healthy fresh food options and physical activity opportunities, and linking patients to chronic disease self management resources to reduce healthcare costs. We are at the forefront, through resources many of us have leveraged, in addressing Maine’s prescription drug and other addiction problems.
Healthy Aroostook in conjunction with its partners helps to bring hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional funds to our schools and communities in Aroostook County and allows us to engage in a broad spectrum of public health work.
Healthy Aroostook has been an active convener in Maine’s emerging public health system. The public health infrastructure that Healthy Maine Partnerships have been instrumental in building has enabled the public health community to respond successfully to emerging public health issues such as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and more recently to mount a statewide awareness and prevention campaign against bath salts.
Aroostook County Action Program has served as the fiscal agent and close working partner of Healthy Aroostook since its inception over 10 years ago. Healthy Aroostook efforts are imperative to reduce chronic disease rates, the primary drivers of high health costs. The needle is moving but we need to continue working at reducing these rates.
Promising indicators for Aroostook County include:
Reducing tobacco use and exposure;
• Previous 30-day tobacco use 9th- through 12th-graders — Aroostook (2009 – 18.7 percent and in 2011 – 16.8 percent);
• Second-hand smoke exposure 9th- through 12th graders — Aroostook (2009 – 54.8 percent and in 2011-51.1 percent).
Decreasing substance abuse:
• Previous 30-day alcohol use 9th- through 12th graders — Aroostook (2009 – 31.8 percent and in 2011 – 26.9 percent);
• Prescription drug taken without a prescription 9th- through 12th graders — Aroostook (2009 – 13.5 percent and in 2011 – 11.6 percent).
Floyd Rockholt, chair
Healthy Aroostook Coalition
