None of us are immune to the harm from structural violence and the “highly toxic gas of inequality.” Read more in our interview with Stephen Bezruchka in this special blog post.
Fred Zimmerman, IAPHS 2019 President-Elect, takes a look at his dashboard on policy and population health, and sees some worrying trends.
How is our new government doing at creating policies that allow people to be health? Dr. Fred Zimmerman updates his dashboard from last July.
State-level work is where it’s at for population health, Dr. Fred Zimmerman reports from the Improving Population Health Conference in Austin October 2-4, 2017.
It’s time for a National Dashboard – a report card on how well policy-makers are supporting the conditions that allow people to be healthy. Population health is about assuring the conditions in which people—all people—can be healthy. This effort has never been more important. I will be monitoring these conditions in the United States and reporting on them here on the IAPHS blog every six months. I welcome your input on which benchmarks should be included. I will begin by monitoring six key issues. Each one has a significant impact on population health, and each can be measured reliably and objectively each year. I’ve chosen these issues for two reasons: each one informs the conditions where health happens (or doesn’t), and each responds relatively quickly to policy changes. Together these metrics make a good start for a report card for the new administration. 1.The Number of Uninsured Americans. With control of Congress, the Republican Party may dismantle several aspects of the Affordable Care Act. For example, Republican Speaker Paul Ryan has promised to dramatically curtail Medicaid by block-granting it to the states. He would also like to end Medicare as we know it and replace it with a system of […]
Elsewhere on the Blog you can find a definition of population health. A useful starting place, for sure, but no place you’d care to end up. Population health is one of the concepts that acquires its meaning as much from how we talk about it as what we say. In these polarizing political times, it is essential that we find a way to discuss population health that unites rather than divides. In 2010, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released a report entitled A New Way to Talk about the Social Determinants of Health, which begins with this insight: “It turns out that trying to figure out how to say something simply can be a complicated process.” Indeed! That’s why it’s always worth choosing our words carefully. The report offers concrete techniques to help bring your audience on board with the idea that creating health is a collective project, one that we all have a stake in and some control over. It contains many useful suggestions for phrasing, such as appealing to universally-shared values, like equal opportunity or investing in children. Another good tip is avoiding jargon. Of course, it’s easy to point out things not to do. But what do effective […]
The IAPHS Forum aspires to be more than a website or a blog; it aspires to be a place where we all can write, and by writing, create a community. To be specific, it aspires to create a community that helps population health science grow stronger, and its translation more effective. IAPHS: A place for us to explore the upstream determinants of health together. Photo: Brian Fitzgerald. The purpose of the Forum is to create a space in which ideas can be shared—necessarily in written form, given our geographic dispersal—and in which commonalities can be recognized and differences productively worked through. Communities are networks of social trust, and this social trust can be forged only through frequent and candid airing of views. What’s essential about this process is the interaction it implies. This Forum will succeed only to the extent to which broad participation is achieved. We’re hoping that participation will be extensive among IAPHS members, as well as non-member colleagues with information and perspectives to share. The idea of population health is espoused by many individuals in public health departments, universities, and local governments. But numbers alone do not make a community. We propose this Forum as the place […]