Health Outcomes

What is a health outcome?

Health outcomes represent how healthy a population is at any given time. Positive health outcomes may be reflected in measures such as mortality (length of life); morbidity (quality of life); and level of functioning well mentally, physically, and socially; and having a sense of well-being.

Many factors influence health outcomes for a population. How much a community invests in making health care accessible to all; community safety; the physical environment of that community (safe drinking water and air quality for instance); the availability of good jobs; access to affordable housing; and good transportation systems all affect a community's health and impact health outcomes.