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Rebecca Herman, grants manager of The Partnership for a Healthier Carroll County displays charts from the group’s recent survey of Carroll County’s annual health.

Written By David Greisman

We exercise less than recommended. We do not eat as well as we should. As a society, we are more overweight than ever. Increasingly, we have high blood pressure and heart problems. Our high school students are still drinking, smoking and using drugs. And a higher number of Carroll County residents do not have health insurance and cannot afford to see a doctor.

Those are some of the problems. Fortunately, many in the county are working toward solutions . That is the conclusion of the latest Healthy Carroll Vital Signs survey, a project of The Partnership for a Healthier Carroll County. The organization aims for precisely what its name describes: connecting local agencies and residents in an attempt to achieve a healthier populace.

To help get there, the organization “checks the pulse” of the community, surveying people and compiling data on a variety of health indicators. The reports can be found at www.healthycarroll.org.

“What we tend to see is that Carroll County reflects a lot of things that are going on in the whole country,” said Rebecca Herman, the partnership’s grants manager. “We prefer to focus on overall prevention and wellness, the factors that people can actually do something about, such as lifestyles. That’s why the report mentions nutrition and exercise and body weight, because things like that, we feel, can be modified.”

With the caveat that its data is based on survey samples, Healthy Carroll Vital Signs shows a decline in the percentage of adults in Carroll County who exercise for at least 30 minutes five days a week. From 2004 to 2007, that number was near or above 40 percent – a rate higher than the partnership’s “improvement objective” of 30 percent. But in 2008 and 2009 that number dropped, first to 33.8 percent, then to 29.6 percent.

Partnership for a Healthier Carroll County brings in experts and interested people from around the community who analyze the survey’s findings, identify problems and set up projects to tackle them.

So far, the experts have not identified exactly why people exercise less, although Herman suggests it could be due in part to spending more time in front of computer screens.

“We’re trying to encourage people and provide resources, such as a list of parks and health clubs, so they can correct this,” said Herman. “You just keep hammering away at the message.”

Persistence is apparently necessary. The obesity rate in Carroll County in 2010 was 23.5 percent, well above the goal of 15 percent or less. The percentage of people either overweight or obese was a staggering 66.8 percent in 2010. Seven percent of adults have been diagnosed with diabetes (the goal is 2.5 percent or less). And only 20.6 percent of area adults – about one in every five – eat fruits and vegetables at least five times a day. The goal is at least 50 percent. The closest the county has come in recent years was 32.6 percent.

One way the partnership is attempting to combat the negative trends is through its healthy dining guide, which lists local restaurants that have healthier choices on their menus, according to Dorothy Fox, the director of community health improvement. The organization also recently challenged restaurants to create a healthy meal for diabetic customers, she said.

The Partnership’s focus extends to childhood obesity, including increasing consumption of fruits and vegetables and decreasing the amount of sugar kids are drinking, Fox said.

“We’re going to have a campaign at high school vending machines,” she said. “We’re able to attack that right now because it’s such a high priority in the nation.”

Also of note in the latest Healthy Carroll Vital Signs report: 10.6 percent of those surveyed in 2010 said they did not have health insurance, and 11.9 percent said they had not been able to afford to see a doctor at some point in the previous 12 months.

Enrollment events are held around the county where people can learn what assistance they might be eligible for and sign up for help.

“Awareness is one issue,” Herman said. “But sometimes people don’t want to sign up for any kind of public assistance; they’re very independent. Another group is young adults who don’t think they need any insurance.”

Herman and Fox note that Carroll County is actually doing better than most of its Maryland counterparts. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which focuses on the nation’s health and health care, ranked Carroll as the fifth-healthiest, behind only Howard, Montgomery, Frederick and Queen Anne’s counties.

“In Carroll County we have many resources that aren’t available in other places, such as Baltimore city,” Herman said. “Our community is known for its cooperation between organizations. Our community is fairly well off. It has room for improvement, and we have the resources to make that improvement.”

One strength of the Partnership is, well, its partnership.

About 10 years ago, Carroll County had about 17,000 people who were uninsured and not receiving health care, and less than half of the children who were on medical assistance were seeing a dentist on a regular basis, according to Barbara Rodgers, director of health planning and community improvement with the county health department. Rodgers works with a Partnership team that determines what can be done to improve access to health care.

Through the years, the team has “brought together members of the community who could begin to look at how we could change those numbers,” Rodgers said. “Today, the trends that we see are good but could be better.”

The network of concerned people is key, said Carol Kolb, director of campus wellness at Carroll Community College and chairwoman of the school’s department of health, fitness and exercise science. She works with the Partnership’s prevention and wellness team and its worksite wellness action team.

“What I’ve experienced is a very cohesive group that works very well together and gets things done,” she said. “There’s a wonderful momentum within Carroll County to improve the health of citizens here.”