As I write this, I have had the tremendous privilege of spending the holidays with my family, my siblings, cousins, “tias y tios” and those still left with us. I have been thinking of the families that we are born to and the families that we make and I feel fortunate to have people around me who are important anchors in my life.
Holidays give us the pause to reflect on those still with us, and those we will no longer enjoy as part of our living family. This past holiday, one of my uncles who has suffered from diabetes and cancer experienced the very rapid decline and then death of his closest friend from a very aggressive cancer. The emotional cost of his buddy’s death was so high for my uncle that he lost his will to live and his own life slipped away at the close of this year.
These experiences remind me of how important family and the communities that we create around us are to health. Although there is currently precious little we can do to change the genetics that determine some of our risk for ill health, evidence is mounting that where we live — as well as how we live — has a major impact on our life’s health prospects. As the World Health Organization states, “health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health.” It moves beyond a focus on individual behavior toward social and environmental interventions.
There are several important movements that focus on the opportunities to expand the public health values and vision into work that strengthens our communities. Work that began several years ago in Europe outlines a “health in all policies” approach to integrating health discussions into a broader community discussion involving decisions around transportation, housing, environment and other spheres of policy work that impact health. The U.S. public health environment has also moved to vigorously adapt these principles. For example, vigilant attention to the growing public interest in climate change offers a series of opportunities to engage in a robust discussion on the health impacts of transportation policy, community design and quality food production. The adoption of health impact assessments into the local policy process is a capacity that we can help to develop at the local level and that can institutionalize the consideration of health in all programs and policies.
With fewer resources within our immediate domains, these tools offer an opportunity to create a greater shared purpose with those whose work impacts health. We need to see other sectors’ work as a valid arena in which to create shared values that support the health of our communities in order to build a community-wide knowledge of, and support for, public health.
This year’s National Public Health Week theme is “A Healthier America: One Community at a Time.” And at this moment, it seems a poignant theme to me. Helping each other to be healthier, and our efforts to build resilient, safe and healthy communities is something that we as public health workers know much about. We need to deepen and apply that knowledge as we move ahead this year.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
