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Healthy People 2020 Essay

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Healthy People 2020 set a goal of reducing the number of completed suicides among the adult population by ten percent. This is a reoccurring theme from Healthy People 2010, where the goal was to reduce the number of suicides from 10.5 to 4.8 per 100,000. Unfortunately, from 2003 to 2013, rate of death from suicide has steadily increased to the current rate of 13.0 per 100,000 deaths (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2013). The goal of Healthy People 2020 is to improve the health of our Nation over the next ten years, from a baseline set of data (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2014). Though suicide is not an illness, it typically is an untreated or undermanaged mental illness that results in a person resorting to …show more content…

One of the limitations of the data reported is that the cause of death is not always clear. It can be difficult for the coroner or medical examiner to determine if the cause of death was suicide versus an accident or homicide. In 1960, in an effort to provide more information about causes of death, the National Mortality Followback Survey was created. This is a 75-page questionnaire that was used to try and determine a more specific cause of death, creating an opportunity to study trends in mortality based on demographic location, and allowing for the ability to study the etiology of certain diseases (U.S. DHHS, 2006). The most recent review was completed in 1993, where death certificates were reviewed from a representative sample of United States residents who were over the age of 15 years at the time of death. Deaths that were ruled to be the result of homicide, suicide, and accidental injury were oversampled. The information gathered from this survey has been used in several studies as a way of guiding the analysis of key policy issues. Such areas of focus include health status and health disparities among different demographic areas of the population (CDC,

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