The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services’ (DHS) Suicide Prevention Task Force completed the statewide listening sessions held throughout fall 2019 and compiled their finding into an initial report. The work of the task force is a complement to the goals and strategies surrounding the governor’s Reach Out PA: Your Mental Health Matters initiative announced earlier this month and his executive order to protect vulnerable populations signed last year.  Informed by the testimonies and suggestions of people affected by suicide, mental health professionals, and other stakeholders from across the commonwealth, the report will be used to develop a comprehensive, long-term strategy for significantly reducing the number of suicides in Pennsylvania.

Feedback from Listening Sessions

In August, the task force announced a series of 10 public listening sessions to be hosted throughout Pennsylvania. Over the next several months, Pennsylvanians gathered to talk about how suicide has affected their lives to help inform the task force’s draft prevention plan and work to reduce stigma around discussing topics such as mental health and suicide. More than 800 people — community members, state and local officials, representatives from county suicide prevention organizations, and stakeholders from other sectors of government — attended the sessions.

As a direct result of these listening sessions, the Suicide Prevention Task Force has identified the following key themes to inform the commonwealth’s four-year suicide prevention strategy:

• The stigma associated with mental health, suicide, and suicide attempts can affect the likelihood of individuals seeking help or continuing treatment, and how policymakers make decisions that affect mental health systems.
• Resources needed to elevate mental health as a public health issue, incentivize the integration of physical and behavioral health, and improve suicide prevention resources at the local level.
• Barriers to treatment, such as cost and insurance gaps.
• Access to more detailed suicide and suicide attempt data to help policymakers make effective, meaningful decisions.
• Issues within the mental health workforce, such as pay and barriers to entry, to improve quality of care.
• With proper resources, Pennsylvania’s schools and educators are uniquely positioned to save lives with suicide prevention strategies and resources.

The Legislature could take direct action to prevent suicides through the passage of a Red Flag Law (to provide a means to remove firearms from someone at risk for suicide) or safe storage requirements for firearms.

Suicide Prevention Plan

The task force anticipates releasing a comprehensive four-year statewide suicide prevention plan in the first quarter of 2020 that will be available for a public comment period. Following updates based on public comment, the task force will publish the final 2020-2024 Pennsylvania statewide suicide prevention plan, which will include:

• The landscape and gap analysis of detailed suicide statistics nationwide and in Pennsylvania.
• Guiding principles for suicide prevention in Pennsylvania.
• Goals and objectives to reduce suicide and suicide attempts in Pennsylvania, including reducing the stigma associated with suicide, suicide attempts, and mental health challenges.
• Recommendations for local and state policymakers, including public and elected officials, as well as cross-sector partners.
• A structure for the implementation and evaluation of Pennsylvania’s statewide suicide prevention plan.

You can read the task force’s initial report online. For more information on the task force visit the Suicide Prevention Task Force DHS web page.

Rural areas have long been racially and ethnically diverse. Yet most research on rural health focuses on rural-urban disparities without an explicit focus on within-rural differences in health by race and ethnicity. In that research on rural-urban disparities in health, rural residents tend to fare worse on most measures, including mortality, health status, access to care, and use of preventive services. Less is known about whether there are differences in healthcare use among rural residents by race and ethnicity. In this from the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research center, researchers examine differences in preventive care among rural residents by race and ethnicity.  The brief can be accessed here.

Rural residents often travel farther to access medical care, especially obstetric care, and are more likely to be uninsured or underinsured than urban residents, contributing to higher rates of maternal morbidity. To raise awareness and increase understanding of the relationship between transfer, delivery hospital location, and severe maternal morbidity and mortality (SMMM) for rural residents, researchers at the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center compared data for rural and urban residents who gave birth between 2008 and 2014, to describe the relationship between a need to transfer patients for specialized care and increased risk for maternal morbidity and mortality.  The report can be accessed here.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently released two reports that compare health issues between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas of the U.S.  In Potentially Excess Deaths from the Five Leading Causes of Death, researchers found that the gap in the percentages of preventable deaths between rural and urban counties widened over the eight-year study period for cancer, heart disease, and chronic lower respiratory disease, remained relatively stable for stroke, and decreased for unintentional injuries.  A study on Lung Cancer Incidence found that rates decreased in both urban and rural areas during the ten year period from 2007-2016, but the smallest decrease occurred among females living in nonmetropolitan counties.  Click here to access the report.

Large, brand-name drugmakers could lose $1 trillion in sales and remain profitable enough to maintain their current investments in research and development, according to a report released last week by West Health and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Sean Dickson, director of health policy at the West Health Policy Center and the lead author of the analysis, said the findings suggest drug pricing regulations would not substantially harm the industry. (Source: Healthcare Finance News, 11/14)

The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) released Industrial Make-Up of the Appalachian Region, a new report examining employment and earnings across the Region. Drawing on data from 15 industry sectors, the report catalogs how the Region’s industrial make-up and earnings compare to that of the country as a whole. The report primarily focuses on the period from 2002–2017 — the years immediately before, during, and after the Great Recession – and finds that employment growth varies across the Region. Overall, while post-Recession employment growth has been positive in Appalachia, it lags behind the growth that was experienced by the country as a whole. The report also finds an overall employment shift across the Region towards professional & technical services; health & social services; and tourism-related jobs.

Among the Report’s key findings: from 2012 to 2017, employment across all industries in Appalachia grew 4.7 percent. While growth was positive, employment nationwide grew 9.6 percent during the same time period. From 2012 to 2017, the fastest growth in employment occurred in Appalachia’s South Central and Southern subregions, at 6.6 percent and 10.4 percent, respectively. In 2017, the five industries with the largest employment shares in the Region were professional & technical services (12.1 percent), health and social services (11.6 percent), retail and trade (11.1 percent); state and local government (11.1 percent); and manufacturing (10 percent). In 2017, 10 percent of Appalachia’s total employment was in the manufacturing industry, a larger share than the country as a whole (6.8 percent).

Mental Health America has released their state by state report on mental health care. Pennsylvania is ranked number one in the nation in State of Mental Health in America. The access measures include access to insurance, access to treatment, quality and cost of insurance, access to special education, and workforce availability. A high access ranking indicates that a state provides relatively more access to insurance and mental health treatment.

With November being National Diabetes Awareness Month and Americans collectively spending nearly $200 billion per year on obesity-related health costs, the personal-finance website WalletHub released its report on 2019’s Fattest States in America as well as accompanying videos, along with interesting stats about diabetes in its Facts & Statistics infographic.

To determine which states contribute the most to America’s overweight and obesity problem, WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 29 key metrics. They range from share of overweight and obese population to sugary-beverage consumption among adolescents to obesity-related health care costs.