U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Assistant Secretary for Health, Dr. Howard Koh discussed improving public health quality and the challenge of celebrating how public health makes a difference at the recent meeting of Public Health Foundation's (PHF)
board of directors on December 12 at the Hamilton Crowne Plaza hotel in Washington, DC.
Dr. Koh, who oversees 14 public health offices at HHS, has embarked on a new initiative to
define what quality means within public health, and demonstrate quality in action to community leaders and policymakers to help differentiate it from traditional healthcare related quality improvements.
"Public health is much more than what happens in a hospital," Dr. Koh said. "Health starts in the community where people live, labor, learn, pray, and play."
Dr. Koh's enthusiasm for these public health quality efforts was clear, "For public health quality, this is our opportunity [to] build a legacy that lasts a long time," Koh said, adding that "Quality improvement themes are huge right now within HHS."
However, even as great work has been done in these areas and momentum is building within federal agencies, demonstrating the successes of public health remains a challenge, since healthy people and healthy communities do not create much mass media attention.
Referring to the Healthy People 2010 initiative that helped increase life expectancy, Koh said "The successes of public health gave 300 million Americans an extra year of life [in the past decade]. That's unbelievable."
Serving as a Professor of the Practice of Public Health, and Associate Dean for Public Health Practice at the Harvard School of Public Health as well as the Director of the Harvard School of Public Health Center for Public Health Preparedness, Dr. Koh has a prominent background in public health academia, which fits well with PHF's current academic-centered projects. Through its work with the Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice (Council on Linkages), PHF has developed the country's first
Academic Health Department Learning Community, where the practice and academic communities share best practices on ways agencies and academic institutions can collaborate to improve public health education and training, practice, and research. The
Council on Linkages brings together 19 national practice and academic organizations to assure a well-trained and competent public health workforce.
"How do we prepare our students to be leaders in public health departments?" Koh asked of the PHF board of directors to begin a discussion of building leaders with strong academic practice linkages, where PHF has been working for over 15 years.
"[Dr. Koh's quality initiative] presents a great opportunity to demonstrate how quality improvement can be advanced through the education, training, practice, and research activities of an academic health department," said Paul Erwin, Professor and Director of the Center for Public Health at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and Secretary/Treasurer of the PHB board of directors. "PHF is supporting the translation of research into practice."
PHF plans to explore opportunities to integrate the HHS quality priorities into new initiatives it is pursuing designed to help build public health and healthcare system collaboration. One such opportunity may be through the use of QI methods and tools to facilitate combined efforts of hospitals and health departments in developing community health assessments and improvement plans that the IRS requires for nonprofit hospitals, and the Public Health Accreditation Board requires for health departments seeking
accreditation.
PHF's board of directors is composed of two state public health officials, two local public health officers, one local board of health member, and six individuals from academic, private sector, and other public health agency settings.
The next PHF board of directors meeting is planned for March 2012.