How Zip Codes Affect and Often Limit Healthcare Services

NEWS & RESEARCH

How Zip Codes Affect and Often Limit Healthcare Services

How Zip Codes Affect and Often Limit Healthcare Services

Most people in the healthcare community are taught to evaluate a certain set of factors when they assess their patients. The forms patients are asked to fill out contain questions that are designed to delve into their personal medical history, their family medical history, and their surgical history.

While doing their assessments nurses will often ask questions about their social leanings. For example, nurses ask patients about alcohol consumption, tobacco or nicotine use, and any illicit drug usage. However, there is one thing nurses and doctors fail to consider in their assessments, and that is the zip codes of their patients. There is a wealth of evidence that shows that the zip code a patient resides in is a determining factor in their life expectancy.

Contributing Factors

There are a plethora of factors that contribute to the health and welfare of people. Social factors like whether a person has a stable place to live, the types of food they have access to, and whether they have access to healthcare services are generally the top-tier issues among healthcare practitioners. The type of education a person has in addition to being able to obtain steady employment are also top-tier issues in the medical community.

When the diet of a patient is evaluated, members of the healthcare community often talk about food integrity and the inability of people to gain access to healthy food. There are notable examples of communities in the United States where either a lack of access to viable food or enough food has led to the deterioration or deaths of citizens. Many of the people most affected by food insecurity are the most vulnerable people living in the country.

In a recent Gallup Well-Being Index, Toledo, Ohio was ranked 99 out of 100 communities. The city was ranked last for infant mortality and low birth weight babies. The study also determined that while seventy percent of the adult population was overweight, 36 percent of the families identified as low-income were concerned that they didn’t have access to enough food to eat.

For Your Consideration

Nurses and other medical professionals need to consider social determinants of health during the diagnostic process. Taking a little time during the assessment process could mean the difference between life and death for a patient who is facing social challenges like homelessness, unemployment, or a lack of health insurance. Rarely does a physician take the time to ask a patient if they have medical insurance before they write a prescription. As providers of care, nurses and doctors should try to provide patients who don’t have insurance referrals to people and organizations who can help them.

Patients who don’t have medical insurance or those who live in poor or depressed areas of America’s cities are often so discouraged when they leave the hospital after being admitted or visiting an emergency room, they resolve to not do anything further to maintain their health. Oftentimes when patients become regulars in emergency rooms, they gain a reputation among the medical team that the patient is non-compliant, or they just don’t care about their well-being. People within the medical community, especially nurses need to be careful about making these types of assumptions about the patients they see. If a patient is making frequent trips to the emergency room or being admitted for the same symptoms, there is a good reason for someone to investigate the causes more closely.

Pharmacies encounter countless numbers of people who leave their pharmacies without the medications they need because they can’t afford them. An uninsured patient who has just been discharged after spending several days in a hospital to get their blood sugar levels under control is probably not going to be able to afford $800 for prescriptions to manage their condition.

The responsibility of a nurse is to make sure people get the care they need. Sometimes that requires taking some time and exerting a little extra effort to help those who need it. The average patient is not a medical professional, so they wouldn’t know that Walmart offers NPH and NPR for a fraction of the cost of many popular diabetic maintenance drugs. With the fate of the Affordable Care Act looming, nurses and other medical practitioners must do more to help save the lives of the people in the communities they serve.

The Count

Another issue that has a huge impact on the type of healthcare a community has is directly connected to whether there is a hospital or a medical provider in the area. Most people in America are not aware that there have been over 100 rural hospital closures since 2010. Many of these areas lost their physicians when their hospitals closed, as independent physicians could not afford to practice in areas without the economic benefits of a hospital. The state of Texas has 35 counties with no physicians.

According to a survey released by the North Texas Regional Extension Center, there are 185 counties in Texas with no psychiatrists. These counties represent 3.1 million people. 158 counties in Texas have no general surgeon, leaving 1.9 people without access to surgical care. Expectant mothers in 147 counties have greater concerns as there is no obstetrician/gynecologist to treat them and their unborn babies. Over 80 counties in Texas have five physicians or fewer leaving them with no access to health care.

It’s important to note that Texas is not an anomaly in the country. There are a number of states that have counties with no physicians. Some of these states include:

  • Alabama
  • Alaska
  • Arizona
  • Arkansas
  • California
  • Colorado
  • Florida
  • Georgia
  • Idaho

Nurses and all members of the healthcare community must be vigilant about making sure we understand the impact the policies that regulate them have on their communities and surrounding communities. The state of the healthcare system is more dependent now than ever on educated practitioners who are willing to look beyond the obvious to find solutions to the problems impacting their profession.

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