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Canberra Today 14°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Friendly walking communities prevent diseases

RESEARCHERS from the University of Canberra have uncovered a link between neighbourhood walkability, how friendly a community is to walk in, and reduced hospital admissions for chronic disease in the ACT. 

The research compared hospital admission data and “neighbourhood walkability” or Walk Score® results for various suburbs in Canberra.

Walk Score® is a tool that uses online maps to quantify a suburb’s number of interconnected streets and the presence of shops, restaurants, services, public transit stops and parks within walking distance of each other.

Research fellow, biostatistician and lead author of the research Yan Yu says the project focused on the four chronic diseases which are among those with the greatest burden on health costs in the ACT.

“Our findings show that as the walkability score for a suburb improves the rate of hospital admissions and health care costs associated with these chronic diseases drop,” she says. 

“We focused on cancers; endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases, such as diabetes; circulatory diseases; and respiratory diseases.

“We examined data from 30,690 hospital admissions covering 88 ACT suburbs from 2011 to 2013, and we found that 80 per cent of these suburbs were still car dependent.

“Making the kind of changes that would make a car dependent suburb into a walkable one would deliver a 12 per cent reduction in costs and a 12.5 per cent cut in hospital admissions.”

Dr Yu says these could be as simple as improving footpaths and bike paths, revitalising local shops or increasing public transport access.

The research also took into account neighbourhood socio-economic status and found it didn’t impact on the results and the link between walkability and health care costs.

UC-HRI public health researcher and co-author Vincent Learnihan says changing the way our suburbs are planned or introducing relatively small changes can return significant dividends.

“Over the period of our research, the ACT paid $251.8 million in public hospital costs for the treatment of the four major chronic diseases. Of course, individually we’d all place a much higher value on being healthy and free of chronic disease,” Mr Learnihan says.

“What it found is a high rate of car dependency across most of Canberra, making it harder to capitalise on the benefits of walking. But the changes needed to encourage more people to walk would return a significant dividend in tax-payer dollars and healthier communities.”

The article is available online

 

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