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Community Profiles

Click the blue bars below for more information about Community Profiles or choose a community type from the Community Profiles menu above to get started.

What are Community Profiles?

Community Profiles are summary tables of the most recent data available from multiple NJSHAD Health Indicator Reports for a single community, along with comparison data for New Jersey and the United States, where available.

What's a community?

In NJSHAD, "community" refers to a group of people, not necessarily a geographic area.

  • Indicator
    • The indicator title is a clickable link to the corresponding Health Indicator Report in NJSHAD.
    • Under the indicator title is the measure description and the year represented by the data in the table.
    • Hovering over the question mark help icon icon will show the full indicator definition.
  • Community
    • The value for that indicator and measure for the selected community.
    • Numbers in parentheses below the value represent the confidence interval for that value. Confidence intervals are used to determine if the community's rate is better, similar, or worse than the statewide rate.
  • New Jersey: the statewide value for that indicator and measure.
  • Compared to New Jersey
    • Shows whether the community's value is better, similar, or worse than the state's value.
    • The comparison is based solely on confidence intervals.
    • If confidence intervals are not given in the corresponding Health Indicator Report, no comparison can be made but the values are still shown.
    • If a measure doesn't have a direction (i.e., high values are good or high values are bad), no comparison can be made but the values are still shown.
  • United States: the national value for that indicator and measure.
  • Compared to United States: See "Compared to New Jersey" notes above.

  • Births and Infant Health: Key indicators of maternal and infant health.
    • Links to additional birth and infant health data are available on the Births, Infants, and Maternal Health Topic page.
    • Note: Some neighboring states do not report all birth certificate items to NJDOH for residents who gave birth in their state, thereby creating a high proportion of records with unknown values for those items. In particular, Hudson and Passaic have high proportions (>5%) of records with unknown prenatal care onset. This artificially lowers their First Trimester Prenatal Care percentages.
  • Chronic Disease Indicators: Key surveillance indicators of chronic diseases and their risk factors.
  • Demographics and Social Determinants of Health: Characteristics that often determine the health of a population.
  • Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT): Indicators of environmental hazards, human exposures, and public health outcomes.
    • The New Jersey Department of Health and New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection collect data on health, human exposures, and environmental hazards.
    • The New Jersey EPHT Network brings this information together and is part of the National EPHT Network.
  • Healthy New Jersey 2020: Health objectives that were to be achieved by 2020.
    • Healthy New Jersey (HNJ) is an initiative focused on identifying and addressing New Jersey residents' priority health needs.
    • HNJ2020 was modeled after the federal Healthy People 2020 initiative and its data component was comprised of measurable objectives for the 2010-2020 decade.
  • Injury and Violence: Key surveillance indicators for injury prevention and control.
  • Leading Causes of Death: Top ten causes of death in the most recent data year.
    • The leading causes of death given in Community Profiles are the top ten for New Jersey as a whole.
    • The top ten for a particular community may vary.
    • Links to data for other causes of death are available on the Mortality and Leading Causes of Death Health Topic page.

If more detailed data are needed than what a Community Profile or Indicator Report provides, the Custom Query System is available or program staff can be contacted directly using the information provided in the Indicator Report footer at the bottom of each Indicator Report page.

  • For technical reasons, communities defined by sub-county geographical boundaries (e.g., municipalities, Census tracts, zip codes), including those like Newark and Jersey City that have larger populations than many counties, cannot be considered here.
  • Many datasets do not have accurate information on municipality of residence or do not collect geographic information at that level of detail.
  • There would be too many small numbers which lead to data reliability issues.
  • Municipality-level data are available in some datasets in the Dataset Queries, so users can create their own tables of statistics.
  • See Small Area (Sub-State Level) Data for other options for obtaining statistics for sub-county geographies such as municipalities and local health jurisdictions.

Geographic Communities


Demographic Communities

Use and reproduction of the information published on this website is encouraged and may be done without permission. Please refer to the NJSHAD Citation page for suggested citations.

Community Profiles pull data from NJSHAD Indicator Reports. An Indicator Report must include a graphical view with data for county, race/ethnicity, sex, disability status, educational attainment level, or poverty status in order to be included in the Community Profile for any community of that type. For instance, in order to see a summary of data for Atlantic County, the Indicator Reports of interest must have a graphical view and data for counties. If your Community Profile is missing data for a health indicator, it is because the corresponding Indicator Report does not contain that community.