Crittenden County, Arkansas Community Health Assessment: Subpopulation, Food Insecurity SDOH, Resources and Produce Prescription Intervention

Community Health Assessment: Crittenden County, Arkansas, Subpopulation, Social Determinant of Health, Resources and Evidence-Based Intervention

A. Describe Crittenden County, Arkansas, and a subpopulation at risk, supported by two credible sources: community and subpopulation size, gender, age, race, income, education, poverty, crime, occupations, access to health care, transportation and food, and health and nutrition rates. (1) Describe environmental concerns relevant to the subpopulation. (2) Compare the subpopulation’s demographics with the larger community and explain how data support the health concern.

B. Identify one social determinant of health (SDOH) affecting the subpopulation and explain its effect with local, state or national data: the biggest contributor to morbidity and mortality, controversial local health concerns, what residents are most concerned about, what drives emergency visits or admissions and what reduces quality of life.

C. Describe two resources currently available that address the SDOH. D. Describe two needed resources and explain why each is needed. E. Discuss an evidence-based intervention to close the gap, with one scholarly source from the last five years, and explain how it reduces the gap with one specific example. F. Cite all sources in APA style.

Original example for study purposes (about 1,330 words). Figures come from the sources cited and their data years differ; check for newer releases before you submit, and add local news sources you find.

A. Community and Subpopulation Description

Community. Crittenden County lies in the Arkansas Delta directly across the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tennessee. It had 48,163 residents in the 2020 Census; West Memphis is the largest city and Marion is the county seat (Encyclopedia of Arkansas, n.d.). Interstates 40 and 55 meet near West Memphis, making the county a major trucking and rail hub.

Subpopulation. I focus on Black adults with or at risk for hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Black residents numbered 25,905, or 53.8% of the population, in 2020, compared with 40.0% White and 3.0% Hispanic residents of any race (Encyclopedia of Arkansas, n.d.).

• Gender and age: women make up slightly more than half of residents (about 52%), and the county is relatively young, with roughly 27% of residents under 18 and 14% aged 65 or older (U.S. Census Bureau data summarized by IndexMundi; check QuickFacts for the latest estimates).
• Income and poverty: median household income was $55,358 in 2024, and 21% of residents lived in poverty, compared with 12.5% nationally; 29.3% of children were in poverty. Black residents make up the largest group of people in poverty (Data USA, n.d.).
• Education: 17.4% of adults 25 and older lack a high school diploma (Baptist Memorial Health Care, 2022).
• Crime: the violent crime rate was about 1,270 offenses per 100,000 residents in 2022 (Data USA, n.d.).
• Occupations: the largest occupational groups are office and administrative support, sales and management, and the largest industries are health care and social assistance, retail trade and transportation and warehousing (Data USA, n.d.).
• Access to health care: there is about one primary care physician for every 3,656 residents, 9.6% of residents are uninsured and about one-third are covered by Medicaid (Data USA, n.d.). Crittenden Regional Hospital closed in 2014 (Talk Business & Politics, 2014), leaving the county without a local hospital until a smaller Baptist Memorial Hospital–Crittenden later opened in West Memphis.
• Transportation and food: public transportation is limited, so residents without cars struggle to reach clinics and supermarkets. Projected food insecurity was 18.8% for all residents and 31.0% for children, both above Arkansas rates (17.6% and 22.9%), and 88.9% of students received free or reduced-price lunch (Baptist Memorial Health Care, 2022). Much of the county is classified as low access to supermarkets in the USDA Food Access Research Atlas.
• Health and nutrition: 41.5% of adults have obesity (Data USA, n.d.), and the county has the highest proportion of adults with high blood pressure or high cholesterol in Baptist Memorial’s Northeast Arkansas service area (Baptist Memorial Health Care, 2022).

1. Environmental concerns. The county sits on Mississippi River bottomland protected by levees, and historic floods in 1927 and 1937 displaced hundreds of families (Encyclopedia of Arkansas, n.d.), so flooding and drainage remain risks. Two Superfund sites, the South Eighth Street Landfill in West Memphis and Gurley Pit near Edmondson, have completed cleanup construction but remind residents of past hazardous waste contamination. Heavy truck traffic at the I-40/I-55 interchange contributes to air pollution, and the county was historically part of the Memphis-area ozone nonattainment area. Nearly half of housing (47.6%) was built before 1980, raising lead exposure concerns (Baptist Memorial Health Care, 2022), and extreme summer heat is a threat to older adults and people with hypertension, especially those without reliable air conditioning.

2. Comparison and how data support the concern. Black residents make up a majority of the county, unlike Arkansas as a whole, where most residents are White. They are overrepresented among people in poverty and face higher mortality: the age-adjusted all-cause death rate for 2015–2019 was 1,147.7 per 100,000 for Black residents compared with 959.6 for White residents (Baptist Memorial Health Care, 2022). Together with high rates of obesity, hypertension and high cholesterol, these data show that Black adults in the county carry a disproportionate burden of cardiometabolic disease.

B. Social Determinant of Health: Food Insecurity and Limited Healthy Food Access

Food insecurity and limited access to affordable, healthy food affect this subpopulation by pushing families toward low-cost, calorie-dense, high-sodium foods available at convenience stores and fast-food outlets, which worsen obesity, hypertension and diabetes control.

• Biggest contributor to morbidity and mortality: heart disease is the leading cause of death in Arkansas, claiming 8,531 Arkansans in 2024 (Arkansas Department of Health, 2026). Crittenden’s high rates of hypertension, high cholesterol and obesity, and heart disease death rates above the benchmark (Baptist Memorial Health Care, 2022), point to cardiovascular disease as the main local driver.
• Controversial community concerns: the 2014 closure of Crittenden Regional Hospital, which followed financial losses, declining patient volume, physician departures and fires, sparked local debate over sales taxes and access to emergency care (Talk Business & Politics, 2014). Food insecurity among children and the reliance on mobile pantries are also recurring local issues.
• What residents are most concerned about: based on the data, I believe residents are most concerned about affording food and health care, managing chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes and getting timely care close to home.
• Emergency visits and admissions: county-level emergency department data were not available in the sources I reviewed, but the high burden of uncontrolled chronic disease, asthma and COPD suggests that complications of hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and respiratory illness are likely major drivers.
• What reduces quality of life: poverty, food insecurity, limited transportation and a shortage of primary care combine to make chronic disease harder to prevent and manage, reducing quality of life and life expectancy.

C. Two Available Resources

1. Mid-South Food Bank mobile pantries. The Memphis-based food bank partners with local organizations to hold mobile food distributions in West Memphis for Crittenden County residents, providing free groceries to households that show proof of county residence (Local Memphis, n.d.).
2. East Arkansas Family Health Center. This federally qualified health center at 900 N. 7th Street in West Memphis provides primary care with fees based on ability to pay (Arkansas Rural Health Partnership, n.d.), allowing uninsured and low-income residents to receive screening and management of hypertension and diabetes.

D. Two Needed Resources

1. A clinic-linked produce prescription program. Food pantries help with hunger but often provide shelf-stable foods. A program that gives patients with hypertension or diabetes monthly vouchers for fresh fruits and vegetables, paired with nutrition education, is needed because it targets both food insecurity and the diet-related diseases driving mortality.
2. Reliable access to healthy food retail. A mobile farmers market or a healthy-corner-store initiative that brings fresh produce into low-access neighborhoods, with transportation support, is needed because many residents lack cars and live far from supermarkets.

E. Evidence-Based Intervention: Produce Prescription Program

A multisite evaluation of nine produce prescription programs in 12 states found that adults who received a median of $63 per month for produce, plus nutrition education, increased fruit and vegetable intake by 0.85 cups per day; adults with hypertension lowered systolic blood pressure by more than 8 mm Hg; adults with diabetes lowered HbA1c by 0.29 to 0.58 percentage points; and participants were about one-third less likely to report food insecurity (Hager et al., 2023). Although the study lacked a control group, its population, 45% Black adults with or at risk for cardiometabolic disease and food insecurity, closely matches the Crittenden subpopulation.

How it reduces the resource gap: an example. East Arkansas Family Health Center could screen patients for food insecurity and enroll eligible adults with hypertension or diabetes in a six-month produce prescription program. Patients would receive monthly produce vouchers redeemable at a West Memphis grocery store or a mobile market, attend monthly cooking and nutrition classes and have blood pressure and HbA1c checked at enrollment and at six months. For example, a 52-year-old Black woman with uncontrolled hypertension who relies on food pantries could use $60 per month in vouchers to buy fresh vegetables, learn low-sodium cooking techniques and work with the clinic’s nurse to track her readings. The program links the available resource (the health center) with the needed resource (affordable healthy food), and funding could come from grants, Medicaid managed care partners or federal nutrition incentive programs.

References

Arkansas Department of Health. (2026, February 2). Heart disease remains Arkansas’s leading killer: Know the signs and call 9-1-1 [Press release]. https://healthy.arkansas.gov/article/heart-disease-remains-arkansass-leading-killer-know-the-signs-and-call-9-1-1/

Arkansas Rural Health Partnership. (n.d.). East Arkansas Family Health Center. https://arruralhealth.org/member-locations/federally-qualified-health-centers/east-arkansas-family-health-center/

Baptist Memorial Health Care. (2022). Get better: 2022 community health needs assessment, Northeast Arkansas. https://www.baptistonline.org

Data USA. (n.d.). Crittenden County, AR. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/crittenden-county-ar

Encyclopedia of Arkansas. (n.d.). Crittenden County. Central Arkansas Library System. https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/crittenden-county-762/

Hager, K., Du, M., Li, Z., Mozaffarian, D., Chui, K., Shi, P., Ling, B., Cash, S. B., Folta, S. C., & Zhang, F. F. (2023). Impact of produce prescriptions on diet, food security, and cardiometabolic health outcomes: A multisite evaluation of 9 produce prescription programs in the United States. Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, 16(9), Article e009520. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCOUTCOMES.122.009520

Local Memphis. (n.d.). Mid-South Food Bank and Southland Casino host mobile food pantry in West Memphis. https://www.localmemphis.com/article/life/food/southlandcasino-midsouth-food-bank-westmemphis-arkansas/522-95320e48-0159-4da4-ab3f-4245d2631390

Talk Business & Politics. (2014, August). Crittenden Regional Hospital to close permanently on September 7. https://talkbusiness.net/2014/08/crittenden-regional-hospital-to-close-permanently-on-september-7/

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