If there was one central message that public health professionals conveyed during APHA’s 142nd Annual Meeting and Exposition in New Orleans, it was that place matters to health.
From scientific presentations to poster sessions to films, the idea that where people live, work and play has an impact on their health resonated throughout the five-day event in November.
Marchers show their support for a smoke-free New Orleans during a Nov. 17 rally and parade at APHA’s Annual Meeting.
Photo by MIchele Late
With a theme of “Healthography: How Where You Live Affects Your Health and Well-Being,” the APHA meeting showcased that factors such as environment, infrastructure, industry and community services can make the difference as to whether people live long, healthy lives.
Meeting-goers connect during the Public Health Expo.
Photo courtesy EZ Event Photography
Attendees pose for a photo with provided New Orleans-style props.
Photo courtesy EZ Event Photography
Such factors come into play whether people live in urban New Orleans — the site of the Annual Meeting — or in other parts of America, APHA Executive Director Georges Benjamin, MD, told the more than 5,000 attendees at the meeting’s Nov. 16 opening session. People who live just miles apart can have a significant difference in life expectancy. And because some states have chosen to cover their residents with health insurance and others have not, where people live plays a role in their access to care, he said.
Acting U.S. Surgeon General Boris Lushniak called on attendees at the Annual Meeting opening session to “keep yelling and screaming” with a renewed passion for public health.
Photo courtesy EZ Event Photography
“It’s very clear to me that place matters,” Benjamin said.
The importance of place in health was reinforced by Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, MBA, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, who noted during the meeting’s Nov. 19 closing session that “the effects of where you live are so profound that your ZIP code may in fact be as important as your genetic code in how well and how long you live.”
Mary Wakefield, PhD, RN, administrator of the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, who also spoke at the meeting’s closing session, emphasized that place also matters in rural America. Living in rural America is not always “a ticket to longer or healthier lives,” Wakefield said. In fact, life expectancy has been consistently lower in rural areas than in urban areas, and that gap is widening.
Rural communities face a number of challenges to health, including less access to care and high rates of poverty. But these challenges are ones that can be overcome, Wakefield said. In rural America, health is everyone’s business, she said.
Linda Birnbaum, PhD, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, speaks on research efforts in response to the 2010 Gulf oil spill at a meeting session.
Photo courtesy EZ Event Photography
For more than 6 million black Americans who moved away from the South during the 20th century’s Great Migration, place mattered not just to those seeking new lives, but also to their future generations, said Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson during the opening session. Wilkerson, author of the “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” noted that the migration changed America.
“These people were able to create worlds for themselves and pursue dreams for themselves that would never have been possible (otherwise)…and in doing so, they changed parts of our country’s culture,” Wilkerson said.
Public health advocates are continuing to work to change the nation’s culture, transforming it from one focused on treatment and chronic illness to a culture of health, Lavizzo-Mourey said.
Mary Wakefield, administrator of the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, speaks to students at the expo about the Affordable Care Act and public health careers.
Photo courtesy EZ Event Photography
A culture of health is one in which promoting health is as important as treating disease, she said. She described a world in which doctors openly share medical notes with their patients, where optimal child health is a matter of fact and where community members work together to help make healthy choices easy.
“It’s a bold idea and it’s one that I believe is possible,” Lavizzo-Mourey said.
Meeting events extended well beyond the healthography theme, embracing the breadth of public health. The meeting also served as an opportunity for public health professionals to reenergize their commitment to the field.
Outgoing APHA President Joyce Gaufin, who completed her term at the close of the meeting, inspired attendees, calling on them to nurture their passion and link it to a purpose.
Former Surgeon General David Satcher, MD, PhD, was one of the speakers at a Nov. 17 session featuring surgeons general.
Photo courtesy EZ Event Photography
“You cannot win a social movement without having passion,” she said. “You are the heart of public health.”
Acting U.S. Surgeon General Boris Lushniak, MD, MPH, called on attendees at the opening session to “boldly go out to keep yelling and screaming and with a renewed passion that happens at meetings like this” and refocus the nation on health.
J.T. Lane, assistant secretary for public health at Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, speaks at the meeting closing session.
Photo courtesy EZ Event Photography
“Without a healthy people, we are nothing; without a healthy people we have no future,” Lushniak said. “We cannot afford to fail.”
The meeting also featured a session with some of the nation’s surgeons general, offering a look into the challenges and opportunities that come with being the nation’s top doctor.
Author Isabel Wilkerson speaks at the Annual Meeting opening session about the Great Migration and how it changed America.
Photo courtesy EZ Event Photography
Videos from the opening, closing and surgeons general sessions can be viewed on APHA’s YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/aphadc.
Beyond the main events, the meeting offered hundreds of sessions and posters with the latest public health research, as well as networking, career events and business meetings. More than 12,740 people attended the meeting, offering 5,000 presentations, and 600 exhibitors offered information at the public health expo.
New attractions at this year’s meeting included APHA TV, which broadcast daily news reports online, on meeting shuttle buses and in selected hotels. Episodes can be viewed on APHA’s multimedia Web page, www.apha.org/news-and-media/multimedia.
The Annual Meeting was also a time to honor leaders in the field. Among those who received awards during the meeting were Robert Blum, MD, PhD, MPH, the William H. Gates Sr. professor and chair of the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who earned APHA’s Martha May Eliot Award, and Jacqueline Michelle Cutts, MPH, founding president and CEO of Safe Mothers, Safe Babies, who was given APHA’s Jay S. Drotman Memorial Award.
Meeting participants also showed their support for public health on social media, sharing photos on Instagram, making posts on Facebook and sending about 16,200 tweets with the Annual Meeting #APHA14 hashtag. APHA’s Annual Meeting Blog, at www.aphaannualmeeting.blogspot.com, posted more than 60 updates.
Continuing education opportunities were also a popular draw at the meeting. More than 1,400 attendees signed up to earn credits during scientific sessions, while hundreds more participated in two days of Learning Institutes. And for the first time, APHA offered the Certified in Public Health exam during the meeting.
Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, speaks during the closing session.
Photo courtesy EZ Event Photography
People who want to replay a scientific session they attended or take in one they missed can do so through APHA’s E-ssentialLearning program. For a fee, the program offers online access to audio recordings and PowerPoint presentations from scientific sessions held at the meeting, even for those who did not attend.
The 2015 APHA Annual Meeting, which will have a theme of “Health in All Policies,” will be held Oct. 31-Nov. 4 in Chicago. Abstract submissions are now being accepted for the 2015 meeting.
For more on APHA’s Annual Meetings, visit www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
