Skip to main content

Main menu

  • Home
  • Content
    • Current issue
    • Past issues
    • Healthy You
    • Job listings
    • Q&As
    • Special sections
  • Multimedia
    • Quiz
    • Podcasts
    • Videos
    • App
  • FAQs
    • Advertising
    • Subscriptions
    • For APHA members
    • Internships
    • Change of address
  • About
    • About The Nation's Health
    • Submissions
    • Permissions
    • Purchase articles
    • Join APHA
  • Contact us
    • Feedback
  • APHA
    • AJPH
    • NPHW

User menu

  • My alerts

Search

  • Advanced search
The Nation's Health
  • APHA
    • AJPH
    • NPHW
  • My alerts
The Nation's Health

Advanced Search

  • Home
  • Content
    • Current issue
    • Past issues
    • Healthy You
    • Job listings
    • Q&As
    • Special sections
  • Multimedia
    • Quiz
    • Podcasts
    • Videos
    • App
  • FAQs
    • Advertising
    • Subscriptions
    • For APHA members
    • Internships
    • Change of address
  • About
    • About The Nation's Health
    • Submissions
    • Permissions
    • Purchase articles
    • Join APHA
  • Contact us
    • Feedback
  • Follow The Nation's Health on Twitter
  • Follow APHA on Twitter
  • Visit APHA on Facebook
  • Follow APHA on Youtube
  • Follow APHA on Instagram
  • Follow The Nation's Health RSS feeds
NewsOn the Job

Workers using Healthy People goals to improve local health: Objectives guide work in communities

Kim Krisberg
The Nation's Health June 2019, 49 (4) 8;
Kim Krisberg
  • Search for this author on this site

Forty years since the U.S. Healthy People initiative first began, public health workers are still successfully using the decade-long objectives to drive health improvements on the ground.

“State, local and territorial health departments benefit tremendously from using Healthy People 2020 to drive action on national objectives that most directly affect the communities which they serve,” Carter Blakey, deputy director of the U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, which oversees Healthy People, told The Nation’s Health.

Healthy People 2020 includes more than 1,200 objectives on a wide range of disease and health measures, which track high-priority determinants that shape health and quality of life. While Healthy People sets national goals, state and local health workers have long leveraged its data, tools and objectives to advance efforts at the community level, such as using it to track progress, rally cross-sector stakeholders, and learn about evidence-based health interventions.

In Texas, public health workers use Healthy People to help drive support for expanding HIV testing access, said Jenny McFarlane, HIV prevention manager at the Texas Department of State Health Services. The work began a few years after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that HIV screening become a routine part of care. By 2008, however, McFarlane said it was clear that the 2006 recommendations “were not opening up doors to testing like we had hoped.” So she and colleagues in the agency’s HIV-STD Program decided to knock on the doors themselves.

They reached out to and partnered with a variety of health care settings — hospitals, emergency centers, community and correctional health centers — to help providers integrate routine HIV testing. For example, McFarlane and colleagues partnered with large hospitals in the Houston and Dallas areas to integrate HIV testing into emergency care — an especially important strategy for reachrt has shown it is possible for large health systems to successfully fold routine HIV testing into their everyday services.

“It’s definitely helped us engage with providers who are already familiar with (the initiative),” McFarlane said of Healthy People’s role in their HIV work. “It gives you a common language for talking with stakeholders in your community, whether that be a community member, a hospital administrator or a policymaker.”

Figure

Healthy People 2020 has inspired public health programs across the nation, including strategies to deter tobacco use.

Photo by Tom Foldes, courtesy iStockphoto

To the north in Minnesota, successful efforts to reduce tobacco use were featured in a recent ODPHP webcast on achieving Healthy People 2020 indicators on tobacco. Laura Oliven, MPP, Tobacco Control Program manager at the Minnesota Department of Health, said a concerted focus on policy, systems and environmental change has been central in driving tobacco use to new lows.

Over the decades, and in conjunction with multiple partners, the Minnesota health department has helped advance a variety of effective tobacco control strategies, from higher taxes to stronger indoor air laws, ultimately driving the state’s tobacco use rate to the lowest numbers on record.

Now, Oliven told The Nation’s Health, health workers are turning their attention to advanced control strategies, such as raising the tobacco purchasing age to 21 and expanding indoor air policies to include e-cigarettes, which she said threaten to disrupt a 17-year downward trend in youth tobacco use.

Oliven noted that Healthy People not only helps set common goals for tobacco prevention, but also serves as a reminder that tobacco use remains a leading cause of preventable death.

“It gives us a numeric goal that we can all work together toward,” she said of Healthy People. “I think it’s a really valuable framework and umbrella structure for public health.”

Both the Texas and Minnesota experiences are among the many highlighted in Healthy People’s online bank of local health improvement stories — for more, visit bit.ly/healthypeoplestories.

For more on Healthy People 2020 and the upcoming Healthy People 2030, visit www.healthypeople.gov.

  • Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
PreviousNext
Back to top

In this issue

The Nation's Health: 49 (4)
The Nation's Health
Vol. 49, Issue 4
June 2019
  • Table of Contents
  • Table of Contents (PDF)
  • Index by author
  • Complete Issue (PDF)

Healthy You

Quiz

Print
Article Alerts
Sign In to Email Alerts with your Email Address
Email Article
We do not capture any email addresses.
Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Workers using Healthy People goals to improve local health: Objectives guide work in communities
(Your Name) has sent you a message from The Nation's Health
(Your Name) thought you would like to see this item on The Nation's Health website.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Citation Tools
Workers using Healthy People goals to improve local health: Objectives guide work in communities
Kim Krisberg
The Nation's Health June 2019, 49 (4) 8;

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
Share
Workers using Healthy People goals to improve local health: Objectives guide work in communities
Kim Krisberg
The Nation's Health June 2019, 49 (4) 8;
del.icio.us logo Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo Facebook logo Google logo Mendeley logo
Tweet Widget Facebook Like LinkedIn logo

Jump to section

  • Top

More in this TOC Section

  • On the Job in Brief
  • Report: Epidemiologists in short supply at city health departments
  • On the Job in Brief
Show more On the Job

Popular features

  • Healthy You
  • Special sections
  • Q&As
  • Quiz
  • Podcasts

FAQs

  • Advertising
  • Subscriptions
  • For APHA members
  • Submissions
  • Change of address

APHA

  • Join APHA
  • Annual Meeting
  • NPHW
  • AJPH
  • Get Ready
  • Contact APHA
  • Privacy policy

© 2022 The Nation's Health

Powered by HighWire