21st Century Public Health

This webinar, recorded on November 14, 2016 by PHNCI, discusses “the importance of [public health and health care] collaboration and [provides] information about two national initiatives (the newly launched Digital Bridge project and the State Health Values and Strategies program) aimed at improving population health through reforming the delivery of health care services and exchanging information between sectors.”

“To [advance health equity], [health departments] must transform how they work internally, with communities, and alongside other government agencies. To support this challenging work, [HealthEquityGuide.org] developed this set of strategic practices…[to] help local health departments systematically address power imbalances, racism, and other forms of oppression which are at the root of health inequities.”

David Fleming, Hilary Karasz, and Kirsten Wysen of the Seattle & King County Health Department discuss the importance and challenges of evaluating community development projects for health outcomes and impacts. They claim that “in theory, evaluations quantifying the health improvements resulting from well-designed community development projects should be plentiful and broadly disseminated. Unfortunately, practice has not caught up with theory, and our evaluation cupboards are mostly bare.”

In this blog post, Nina Burke and Ruth Wageman at ReThink Health discuss distributed leadership and how it “[plays]out in the context of transforming regional health ecosystems. They explain why distributed leadership matters, specifically comparing it to common governance structures.

“While the term health equity is used widely, a common understanding of what it means is lacking.” This report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWFJ) is “designed to increase consensus around meaning of health equity.” The report puts forth four key steps to achieve health equity.

“In October 2016, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Population Health Improvement hosted a workshop to explore sustainable financing structures that reflect a recognition of the health and non-health factors that shape the well-being of U.S. communities. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.”

“Building Public Health Capacity to Advance Equity is an environmental scan funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to explore governmental public health’s role in advancing health equity with racial equity as a major priority and community engagement as a central strategy. Through literature reviews, in-depth interviews and focus groups with health officials, public health experts, and community leaders across the country, [they] have identified a variety of opportunities for governmental public health to advance equity.”

“In recent years, numerous efforts have arisen across the United States that explicitly seek to improve the public’s health by catalyzing collaboration across multiple societal sectors. In this article [the authors] identify, categorize, and describe an array of multisector initiatives and collaborations currently under way across the United States that explicitly include attention to social, economic, and environmental factors to foster community health and well-being.”

“ASTHO envisions a health system of the 21st century that integrates public health, clinical care, social services, behavioral health, and other stakeholders to comprehensively address the root causes of poor health, ranging from lack of exercise, poor diet, lack of access to care, and other factors. Most determinants of our health affect us outside of doctors’ offices, which means the health sector in the future must work together closely to improve health and reduce costs. The white paper outlines ASTHO’s vision for an integrated health system in the future, and steps that can be taken today to achieve it.”