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Healthy Decisions: A Community Assessment and Healthcare Gap Analysis of Four Border Counties
Prepared for the Knapp Community Care Foundation – May 2015
Team Members: Jesse Rodriguez, Hannah Reisor, Brian Smith
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Wynn Rosser
The purpose of our nine-month Capstone research project was to perform a community health assessment and healthcare gap analysis of the four counties of Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy for the Knapp Community Care Foundation (KCCF). The KCCF utilized our research to inform its grant-issuing guidelines and its selection of future grantees. The four counties studied in the report are often referred to as the Rio Grande Valley (RGV). The consulting project is the result of KCCF partnering with The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and the subsequent research by our capstone consulting team working under a faculty advisor. The community assessment included the collection of tabular data and GIS information from a variety of federal, state, and local government agencies, as well as from a number of non-profits and other organizations. The GIS data was uploaded into ArcGIS Online to visually represent geographical data, such as doctor's office locations and public transit lines, as well as to facilitate analysis.
The gap analysis consisted of an examination of the data collected for the community assessment, with a focus on determining the health disparities between the RGV, Texas, and the United States, and comparing the RGV to similar U.S. counties. The community assessment and gap analysis revealed six major findings:
The RGV faces high levels of food insecurity.
Large numbers of individuals live below the poverty line or are unemployed.
There is low spatial access to healthcare resources.
There are high rates of teen pregnancy.
There is insufficient public transit.
A high percentage of individuals are uninsured.
There are 227,510 food insecure individuals in the RGV, and 159,130 of them are children. The RGV has a higher unemployment level than the national level even though the state's overall unemployment rate is below the national rate. Likewise, the RGV has higher rates of poverty than either Texas or the U.S. Through the analysis of geographical data and an examination of doctor-to-patient ratios, it was determined that there are many areas in the RGV that are medically underserved. Another interesting finding is that the teen birth rate in the RGV is about 47% higher than the Texas rate, while Texas is already one of the ten states with the highest birth rates in the country.
Analysis of public transit routes in the RGV revealed that there are large areas in the four-county region that have little or no access to public transit. Furthermore, Starr and Willacy counties do not have public transit systems.
Finally, the percentage of people without health insurance is higher in the RGV than it is in Texas. This was a staggering finding for our team, as the Texas uninsured rate is the highest in the U.S., which is, in turn, higher than any of its peer countries. To better understand our findings, it is important to first understand the project, the client, and the geographic area that was studied.
To read the entire Capstone Research Project: Healthy Decisions - May 2015
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