21st Century Vision of Public Health

“This report is the first product of the Promoting Health and Cost Control in States (PHACCS) initiative. It identifies policies for good health that look beyond healthcare, part of a larger effort to foster cross-sector collaboration, because changes to any given policy area can impact the population’s well-being and states’ ability to control costs. Additionally, PHACCS recognizes the value of state- and local-level collaboration and includes considerations for those relationships so that policy can be implemented successfully.”

“Public Health 3.0 exemplifies the transformative success stories that many pioneering communities across the country have already accomplished. The challenge now is to institutionalize these efforts and replicate these triumphs across all communities for all people. This report summaries key findings from [regional listening sessions with five communities that are aligned with the PH3.0 vision] and presents recommendations to carry PH3.0 forward.”

Karen DeSalvo, Patrick O’Carroll, Denise Koo, John Auerbach, and Judith Monroe wrote this piece as a call to action “to boldly expand the scope and reach of public health to address all factors that promote health and well-being, including those related to economic development, education, transportation, food, environment, and housing.” This article reviews the shift from Public Health 1.0 to Public Health 2.0, and now from Public Health 2.0 to Public Health 3.0. It also discusses the key components of Public Health 3.0.

The Nation’s Health, a publication of the American Public Health Association, spoke with Surgeon General Jerome Adams, MD, MPH, to learn about what he plans to accomplish in his role. “The theme of [his] tenure will be better health through better partnerships.”

“The HMD Roundtable on Population Health Improvement intends to catalyze urgently needed action toward a stronger, more healthful, and more productive society. The roundtable will therefore facilitate and sustain collaborative action by a community of science-informed leaders in public health, health care, business, education and early childhood development, housing, agriculture, transportation, economic development and community- and faith-based organizations.”

Workshop proceedings and related materials are available on collaboration, communication, and other topics.

“Can you imagine a world in which everyone has a fair chance to be healthy? It starts with the removal of obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, lack of access to good jobs, etc., and ends when the immutable characteristics of race, gender, and sexual identity, are no longer correlated to higher rates of adverse health outcomes. The result is healthier communities. Check out this video to see the panel discussion from this lively conversation at SXSW 2018 on what it takes to make health equity a reality.”

As part of the PHNCI 21st Century Learning Community, “public health officials in [Ohio, Oregon, and Washington] set out to assure their health departments offered foundational public health services—the suite of skills, programs, and activities that must be available in state and local health departments everywhere for the health system to work anywhere, and for which costs could be estimated.” This report summarizes what the states learned into three key themes.

“Local and state health departments need to adapt and evolve if governmental public health is to address emerging health demands, minimize current as well as looming pitfalls, and take advantage of new and promising opportunities. [This paper] zeroes in on what a high achieving public health department of the future will be doing differently. It does so not with a comprehensive inventory of tasks but rather with a distillation of the most important new skills and activities essential to be high achieving and serve in the role of the community chief health strategist.”

“The Win-Win project is a long-term initiative of the Center for Health Advancement at the Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA. It provides good science that drives real-world policy change by showing the education, crime and health impact to populations and value to governments of policies, systems, and programmatic innovations. The project provides a standardized, unbiased economic analysis of interventions to help public-health officials make informed policy and program decisions and engage in cross-sectoral collaboration.”

“AcademyHealth’s Community Health Peer Learning Program explored 17 national and regional programs supporting local and cross-sector collaborations focused on population health improvement at the community level. This environmental scan establishes a baseline understanding for this emerging field of practice, and sheds light on possible opportunities at the funder, program and local project levels to hasten progress toward greater connectivity and collective action.”