The Public Health Education and Health Promotion Section booth beckons visitors at the 2011 APHA Annual Meeting.
Photo by The Nation’s Health
In 1922, three public health educators came together to talk about creating an APHA member group that would address the need to professionalize health education as a specialized area of public health. The following year, the group met again at APHA’s Annual Meeting in Boston to formally launch the Health Education and Publicity Section.
Chaired by a former APHA president, Lee Frankel, the Section had only 17 active members. In 1927, the Section changed its name to the Public Health Education Section.
Fast forward to 2022 and the Section, renamed the Public Health Education and Health Promotion Section in 1990, is now APHA’s largest, boasting nearly 5,000 members and making scores of contributions to public health. Driven by its mission to support work to achieve health equity in all APHA activities, the Section is an advocate for health education and health promotion for individuals, groups, communities and systems.
“I’m excited, I’m proud and I’m humbled to be Section chair during the 100th anniversary,” Samantha Cinnick, MPH, CHES, CPH, told The Nation’s Health. “We are a real professional home for folks who consider themselves health educators, and we are always putting forward new and innovative things for the entire APHA organization.”
An attendee asks a question at the PHEHP Section’s 2019 Annual Meeting film festival.
Photo by The Nation’s Health
Among those innovations is the Section’s new Innovation Lab, which recently came into being as a way to address the challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The lab will provide the framework to bring PHEHP members together to develop innovative solutions for including health educators in future emergencies and other public health challenges.
“Section members realized that health educators weren’t always being included in COVID response and recovery efforts,” Cinnick said. “We are building confidence in people’s abilities to communicate, to lead groups of people, to come up with their own ideas and to make decisions.”
The Innovation Lab is but one of dozens of the Section’s contributions to public health over the past 100 years. A timeline developed by Section historian Moose Alperin showcases the Section’s many contributions to health education policies, publications, educational films, health education institutes and field training.
Among their accomplishments, PHEHP members were instrumental in establishing the National Commission for Health Education Credentialing. Through their efforts, the first health educators were admitted as Certified Health Education Specialists in 1989. In 1990, the first national exam was held to award the CHES credential. Five years later, the Section helped establish APHA’s Continuing Education Board to award continuing education credits to health educators and public health nurses.
“We needed APHA to give continuing education credits because a lot of health educators go to the Annual Meeting, and it was hard to get designated courses at the time,” former APHA President Pat Mail, PhD, MPH told The Nation’s Health. “APHA is now one of the biggest providers of continuing education credits for health educators.”
A Section member for nearly 60 years, Mail said she is personally grateful for the mentoring she received early in her career from PHEHP members.
“Senior health educators are very supportive of junior health educators,” Mail said. “They reach out to them, encourage them and point them in directions where they can learn more. There is a feeling in the Section of camaraderie and helpfulness.”
That camaraderie eventually proved to be the glue that would keep the Section’s two sides — health education and health promotion — from going separate ways when the health promotion members considered breaking off and forming their own Section.
“We worked very hard to tell them they really needed to stay in the Health Education Section,” Mail said. “We even changed our name to Public Health Education and Health Promotion so that they would stay with us. As a result, we retained a substantial number of practitioners, which contributed to our size and our clout.”
Annual Meeting attendees connect at the PHEHP Section booth in 2009. PHEHP, the largest APHA Section with nearly 5,000 members, has made many contributions to public health.
Photo by The Nation’s Health
The health promotion side of the PHEHP Section has attained numerous milestones, including elevating the importance of health communications and reinvigorating the APHA Film Festival.
“We are really proud of those efforts,” said former Section Chair Marla Clayman, PhD, MPH, chair of the Section’s Health Communications Working Group, which will soon celebrate its 25th anniversary.
The Health Communications Working Group came into being at around the same time that the Internet was gaining acceptance as a useful tool for disseminating messages related to health literacy and cultural competency, Clayman said. Today, the working group serves as “sort of a mini-Section,” she said.
The PHEHP Section is also home to numerous committees and subcommittees, including the Health Equity Subcommittee. Rod Lew, MPH, started the Health Equity Subcommittee in 2015 during his term as PHEHP Section chair to advance healt hand racial equity as a public health issue throughout the Section and APHA.
“Health equity is not only about fairness, it is about creating systemic change to dismantle racism and amplify voices and power from within marginalized communities,” Lew told The Nation’s Health.
Through the collaborative work of the Health Equity Subcommittee, the PHEHP Section has since dedicated two invited sessions at each APHA Annual Meeting, created a health equity award, and hosted webinars on health equity.
The PHEHP Section will celebrate its 100th anniversary at APHA’s 2022 Annual Meeting and Expo on Nov. 7 in Boston. Celebration activities will include an interactive digital timeline showcasing the Section’s many accomplishments over the past 100 years, celebration organizer Donna Beal, MPH, MCHES, told The Nation’s Health.
“The PHEHP Section looks forward to celebrating the past at the Annual Meeting and forging our collective public health future in the decades to come,” Beal said.
For more information on the PHEHP Section, visit bit.ly/PHEHP.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
