Healthy People 2020: A Case Study

In Healthy People 2020, it is one of the goals for the United States to reduce fatal injuries. Injury, according to An Introduction to Community Health by James F McKenzie, is physical harm or damage to the body resulting from an exchange of mechanical, chemical, thermal, or other environmental energy. So, any injury that leads to death is the focus of this Public Health Goal set by the United States CDC. This includes but is not limited to vehicle crashes, homicide, suicide, domestic and school violence, child abuse and neglect. This is important not just to prevent the loss of the individual life, but to prevent physical, mental, and/or economic injury or disturbance to the community surrounding the injured person.

The goal to reduce fatal …show more content…
This is to represent the change that we could also expect in the second five years that is left in the data to be collected and quantified. I will be discussing only a few of the disparities, those that are greatest. It has long been known that men have a higher fatal injury rate compared to women. In 2010, males had a rate of fatal injury over twice that of females. Rates for both males and females have increased from 81.1 to 91.1 and 34.1 to 38.1, respectively. Determinants for sex may be linked to willingness to engage in dangerous activities. Distance from a metropolitan area may affect how fast medical attention can be accessed and may very well be the reason there is a disparity between fatal injuries in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. Metropolitan areas fatal injury from 100,000 people increased from 54.0 to 64.9 and nonmetropolitan areas increased from 74.8 to 82.0 people per 100,000. Age groups are fairly consistent from ages 18 to 65 in terms of fatal injury. There is a large difference in ages under 18 and over 65, though. Children are most likely more protected as well as have less chance to participate in dangerous activities and thus have a lower rate of injury related death, around 12 per 100,000. Those over 65 have a much higher rate, around 120-130 per 100,000. The elderly are more at risk for fall related complications, death during car accident, and accidental prescription

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Healthy People 2020 Case Study