Title: Message From The Chair
Author:
Section/SPIG: Epidemiology
Issue Date:
The New View from the IOM
Several newsletters back I referred to the Institute of Medicine’s 1988 report "The Future of Public Health." Whether one agreed with its findings and recommendations or not, it was an influential book in outlining the mission of public health and its core functions, though perhaps with greater consequences in public health practice settings than in academia. Now IOM has issued two follow-up volumes: The first, "The Future of the Public's Health in the 21st Century" (FOPH21C), is the successor to the 1988 report. Of particular interest to epidemiologists is the strong emphasis on what the report calls “multiple determinants of health” and “the ecological model.” The second report, "Who Will Keep the Public Healthy? Educating Public Health Professionals for the 21st Century" (WWKPH), takes the first book’s perspective as the basis for discussing the needs of the new public health workforce and for making recommendations about new competencies and approaches for public health education. These recommendations have important implications for all of us, whether in public health agencies, educational institutions, or other settings. The emphasis on a population health perspective in FOPH21C is closely tied to repeated calls for a stronger governmental public health infrastructure as “backbone” for broader linkages and partnerships across agencies and sectors concerned with the public’s health. Similarly, WWKPH emphasizes the importance of partnerships between schools of public health and other disciplines within the academy, as well as with external partners.
In addition, WWKPH recommends adding eight additional competencies for public health professionals: informatics, genomics, communication, cultural competence, community-based participatory research, global health, policy and law, and public health ethics. Finding space in already packed curricula, not to mention people with expertise to teach in these areas, will be a challenge and will require creative solutions that will, no doubt, depend on the very sorts of partnerships the recommendations call for.
At the University of South Carolina Arnold SPH we are instituting a one-day seminar for all incoming public health students to introduce them to some of the concepts in these reports. We hope to demonstrate the importance of integrating multiple disciplines to address public health problems. A central part of the seminar is presentation of a specific public health problem that representatives of all departments will address in smaller group sessions. We want to engage the students in conversations about how their own field of study relates to the other disciplines of the school in trying to address an important public health challenge. Perhaps we can devote some time at next year’s APHA Annual Meeting to discussions of the implications of these reports for our section and for epidemiology as a discipline.
Robert
PS: For more information, go to the National Academies Press Web site, <www.nap.edu>, and click on Public Health Collection. Scroll down and you’ll find both volumes.