Public health study looks at what it takes to go 'blue'

Jul. 13--Enough of the green phase. It's time for the blue zone.

The community improvement organization Valley in Motion, formerly Heritage Valley Partners, wants to know what it would take to transform Greater Scranton into a bastion of wellness and longevity, a so-called blue zone.

But unlike the phases of Gov. Tom Wolf's three-color plan to reopen the economy amid a pandemic, communities want to stay in the blue zone, not just get through it unscathed.

The concept comes from author and National Geographic fellow Dan Buettner's work 15 years ago in studying regions around the world where chronic disease rates are low and people frequently live to be 100.

The name "blue zone" grew out of earlier research in which social scientists drew diagrams with concentric blue circles around areas with such qualities.

Blue Zones LLC is the company Buettner founded that works with a collaborator, the online health management company Sharecare, to help communities launch public health projects.

Valley in Motion received a $20,000 grant from the Moses Taylor Foundation to kick off local research and identify projects that will have the greatest effects.

President Gus Fahey is recruiting health care providers, businesses and other community organizations to get behind the mission, and plans to release the analyses, still in process, at a public meeting some time in September.

Just what those projects will look like remains to be seen. Fahey is targeting three big ideas and said any programs will focus on shrinking hospitalization rates, dropping overall medical costs and increasing productivity at area businesses.

"We want to turn the Lackawanna valley into a blue zone, an area of exceptional health and wellness," Fahey said. "We're going to identify those areas where the risk prevalence is the greatest, where the best opportunities are for return on investment."

Blue Zones has worked with communities around North America to reduce bad health markers such as smoking rates and obesity starting with small tweaks that change behavior at the population level.

For example, in Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma, two grocery stores called Homeland stopped selling cigarettes.

"They chose to go tobacco-free even though it cut into their profits," said Kathy Laster, Ph.D., president of the Avedis Foundation, an organization that spearheaded the Blue Zones effort in Oklahoma. "They helped us sit down and talk to the other grocery stores because they believed so much in it ... the idea is to make it easier to be healthy if you live here."

Blue Zones is expanding in Pottawatomie County, and its helping to hold steady public health metrics on nutrition, exercise, sense of purpose and standard of living while the rest of the state and country declined, according to the Community Well-being Index, a Sharecare survey.

The region has long suffered with poor health, Laster said. But that started to shift when groups started pursuing blue zone status.

"You have to look at this as a long-term effort," she said. "You will not turn around a community in three years."

Lackawanna County scores worse than the rest of the state on just about every measure in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings.

Here are a few findings:

20% of adults smoke while the state average is 19%.

26% of adults over 20 years old do no physical activity during leisure time. The state average is 23%.

21% of residents report drinking alcohol excessively. The state average is 19%.

In addition, the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council found Lackawanna County had 179 preventable hospitalizations per 10,000 residents last year, notably more than the state average rate of 151 preventable hospitalizations per 10,000 residents.

Fahey plans to assemble a team to raise funding and tackle projects, and possibly pay Blue Zones to send a consultant here to shepherd them through.

That depends on how much support Valley in Motion can raise. The full package could cost between $3 million and $5 million for a three-year agreement, Fahey said. That doesn't include the cost of running projects, such as building bike lanes or boosting nutrition programs with healthy foods in low-income school districts.

"It depends on the appetite for the community for the kind of interventions that need to happen," Fahey said.

Contact the writer: joconnell@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9131; @jon_oc on Twitter.

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