Portrait of Health in the United States. Major Statistical Trends and Guide to Resources.

Presents a picture of American health using a variety of measures ranging from self-perceived health status and reported acute and chronic health conditions to more objective measures such as life expectancy, medical diagnosis, hospitalization statistics, and death rates.

While most of the government statistics presented here can be found on the web, they can be difficult to locate because they are produced by many different agencies. They can also be difficult to interpret. As a result, this book the first of what will be an annual goes a long way toward helping readers find and understand health statistics. Following a useful introduction on the importance of health statistics, statistics on health status and related behaviors are organized in four categories: correlates, conditions, care, and consequences. The narrative describes the source, relevance, and quality of the data for each topic and includes maps or charts and tables detailing trends when appropriate. The book concludes with an extremely helpful chapter, "How To Find More Health Statistics," which offers Internet search strategies and sources, such as the URL for the slides Melnick used in his "Finding and Using Health Statistics" course (www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/usestats/ index.htm). (Melnick taught at the Medical Library Association conference in May 2000.) This work would be more useful as a reference tool if it had included an index. Fortunately, the table of contents and list of tables is very detailed. Recommended for public and academic libraries. Margaret Allen, Library Consultant, Statford, WI
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.