CARMEL – A Community Health Assessment or CHA is a descriptive summary of a population, its health status, and the distribution of health issues and the factors that impact health by identifying the population’s main health issues and their determinants, summarizing the assets and resources that can be mobilized to address the identified issues.
Putnam Health Director Rian Rodriguez said the counties just released comprehensive CHA was not a “single assessment, but rather an amalgamation of component assessments reviewed side by side to present the fullest possible picture of health in Putnam County.”
Component assessments contributing to the 2025 CHA include a review of secondary data from an array of secondary sources and primary data collected locally for the purpose of the CHA. Secondary data sources include federal agency sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the USDA’s Food Environment Atlas; New York State agency sources such as the Department of Health’s Vital Statistics and the NYS Education Department, as well as non-governmental organizations such as Feeding America and Bach Harrison L.L.C’s Prevention Needs Assessment Survey.
Putnam County’s Public Health Educator Shanna Siegel noted that the county’s Health Department engaged with “various collaborative partners to develop and complete s number of component assessments.”
In the area of Economic Stability, there has been an increasing proportion of Putnam’s population in poverty from 6.3 percent to 6.5 percent resulting in an increasing proportion of economically disadvantaged students enrolled in the county’s six school systems.
Despite having a comparatively lower prevalence than other mid-Hudson counties, the overall percentage of food insecure residents in Putnam has been on the rise since 2021.
Siegel also noted that “reduced access to healthy foods may be a contributing factor to the rising rates of overweight and obesity in Putnam.”
When it comes to primary health care, Putnam has more residents per primary health care provider than all counties in the Hudson Valley except for Sullivan County.
Survey respondents cited the inability to obtain an appointment as a top reason for not undergoing an annual physical examination.
In the area of mental health, the proportion of residents rating their mental health as fair or poor has increased from 19 percent in 2022 to 25 percent in 2025 while the three-year average suicide mortality rate increased from 4.6 from 2019-2021 to 7.3 for 2022-25.
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