Private Groups Collaborate to Forecast Alternative Futures for Public Health in 2030

Strategies Recommended as Sound No Matter What the Future Holds

Author: Roger Bernier, MPH, PhD

A collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Institute for Alternative Futures, and the Kresge Foundation has produced four recommendations for facing the future challenges of public health that are likely to be sound regardless of which future scenario emerges, according to the report from the group.

Entitled “Public Health 2030 A Scenario Exploration” , the report constructs scenarios based on the forecasted behavior of six key drivers of public health. The purpose of these scenarios is to help public health agencies evaluate how well their organization’s strategies are likely to perform given these different futures to consider.

Key Recommendation

The key recommendation is to transform public health agencies into “health development agencies” with dedicated, sustainable, and sufficient funding. What does the concept of health development agency entail?

According to the report, the current “programmatic approach” of public health does not address the major drivers of health. This is a serious shortcoming and amounts to saying that public health is not effectively enough addressing the major causes of health. If so, what are these drivers that need rethinking and suggest new approaches from public health?

Future Trends / Drivers

The drivers/trends identified by the sponsors of the report are:

1) chronic diseases and the likely to grow demand for prevention, management, and reduction of these conditions,

2) climate change and environmental threats and the extent to which public health is able to expand its capacities to deal with environmental disasters and disease outbreaks,

3) the extent to which the nation adopts a community prevention approach that is focused on addressing the structural drivers of illness and injury,

4) economics and public health financing,

5) injury and violence and the extent to which they come to be seen as preventable, and

6) technology and information system advances.

Health Development Agencies

The first recommendation to transform health agencies into “health development agencies” will entail continuing some of the current roles of health agencies but also taking on new ones. Perhaps the most striking is the call for health agencies to become the “chief health

- 2030 cont'd on page 10 strategists” in the community and lead in creating a culture of health through the promotion of prevention strategies. To achieve the status of a true “health development agency” the report calls for health agencies to develop sustainable and sufficient funding, be evidence and best practice oriented, and provide trusted leadership in promoting prevention strategies.

Chief Health Strategists

The second recommendation calls for health development agencies to facilitate the transformation of the US health care system into one more oriented to prevention. This appears to be a recommendation to help reinforce a trend already evident in American society moving favorably to think in terms of population health.

Dialogue Expertise

Third, the report recommends building the capacity for dialogue about inclusion, opportunity, and equity. This is prompted by the recognition that racism and other beliefs or prejudices are part of the root causes of health inequity. Addressing them is needed to advance community vitality, according to the report.

The fourth and final recommendation is another to create the capacity for dialogue, this time with other non-health sectors which are needed to support innovation. Basically, this recommendation calls for recognizing the legitimate priorities and needs of other players in the health system and learning lessons from other players to create innovations in public health. ■

Epi Crossword Puzzle –

October 2023 Dedicated to the Hawaii Epi-in-Action Participants

Our crossword puzzle was created by by Dr. Richard Dicker A former CDC employee and notquite-retired epidemiologist. For an online version go to: https://tinyurl.com/hhjd6ndr - Crossword Questions cont'd on page 13

Across

1. Trinidad drum material

6. Pack down

10. Viasat, Spectrum, Google Fiber, et al.

14. Plantain lily

15. Banned apple spray

16. Shorthand for authenticate or list of approved applicants

17. Four-letter sports network channel

18. Bigger than big

19. Cleveland's lake

20. Method used for some clinical trials

23. Bemoan

25. "____ Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud, Loud Music)"

26. Approaches

27. Most epidemiologic studies are this

32. Characteristic of real-world data

33. Taj Mahal city

34. God of love

35. Meat on a stick

37. One-dish meal

41. Assistant

42. Name that can be spelled with or without an H

43. Common type of field epidemiology study

47. "______ for Murder"

49. Laugh syllable

50. MAD magazine coverboy's initials

51. For a field epidemiologist, word after case or outbreak

56. Czech or Serb

57. Glitch

58. "Taps" instrument

61. Nicolas Coppola's screen name

62. High school breakout

63. Flair

64. Actor Luke's actor brother

65. "From _____ to riches"

66. Queen of _______

Down

1. Pronoun paired with her

2. Lean-___ (sheds)

3. What a tired epidemiologist might order at Starbucks

4. It's active in Sicily

5. Common household chore

6. San-serif font used instead of Arial so "Ill" does not look like the Roman numeral 3

7. Grad

8. Travelers to Bethlehem

9. Big boss, informally

10. In the South, what "Sweet or unsweet?" refers to

11. Kind of number

12. Type of probability, to Bayesians

13. Antique guns

21. Math op.

22. Vogue's Wintour

23. UN's Food and Agricultural Organization is headquartered here

24. How an epidemiologist might get to the airport

28. Road curve

29. ______ dorsalis (manifestation of tertiary syphilis)

30. Grocery chain known by its initials

31. Sphere

35. White wine plus crème de cassis

36. Tokyo, formerly

37. Took a load off

38. Stable geometric shape

39. Gutter location

40. One of a 42-Down's five W's

41. They're often pressed for cash

42. Journalists

43. Lay waste to

44. _____ Blue Men (Berton Rouché epi cluster description)

45. Viruses that infect bacteria

46. "Mangia!"

47. "Saturday Night Fever" music

48. Acquired relative

52. Ruler during the time of "War and Peace"

53. Early Peruvian

54. Jets or Sharks, e.g.

55. "That hurt!"

59. Part of FELTP

60. 7th Greek letter

Editor's Note: All of us are confronted with more material than we can possibly hope to digest each month. However, that doesn't mean that we should miss some of the articles that appear in the public media on topics of interest to the epi community. The EpiMonitor curates a monthly list of some of the best articles we've encountered in the past month. See something you think others would like to read? Please send us a link at info@epimonitor.net and we'll include it in the next month

Public Health Topics

♦ Towards a Ready Workforce: Field Epidemiologists in Pandemic Planning (WHO) https://tinyurl.com/3edm66bp

♦ A seasonal viral stew is brewing (Georgia Public Broadcasting) https://tinyurl.com/22jyjrkk

♦ Wastewater reveals which viruses are actually circulating and causing colds (NPR of Northern Colorado) https://tinyurl.com/24z4pw5f

♦ San Gabriel Valley Mosquito & Vector Control District responds to locally acquired case of Dengue (Pasadena Now) https://tinyurl.com/yfbu332d

♦ Researchers Use Whole Genome Sequencing to Make Surprising Discovery about Hospital-Acquired C. Diff Infections (Dark Daily) https://tinyurl.com/4p6wvcbv

♦ The epicenter of the worst bird flu crisis in history, with 250 million birds culled, shifts to Europe (El Pais) https://tinyurl.com/mpkd5xjk

♦ Congresswoman Announces $1 Million in Federal Funds for Wastewater Epidemiology Training Program at Queens College https://tinyurl.com/3695b48c

♦ U.S. Scientists Deliberately Infected People With Zika Here's Why (Forbes via AppleNews) https://tinyurl.com/23zpwhnn

- Reading cont'd on page 17

What We're Reading This Month - con't from

a quote from the document or the summary of an interesting point. You can position the text box anywhere in the document. Use the Text Box Tools tab to change the formatting of the pull quote text box.] page 15

Public Health Topics, cont.

♦ Tainted water and viruses put Gaza residents, especially kids, at further risk (NBC News) https://tinyurl.com/56pw7sff

♦ Another Possible Benefit of Vaccinations: They Just Might Save Your Brain (AARP Bulletin) https://tinyurl.com/3sajjcpv

♦ Mystery paralysing 'illness' hospitalises 95 schoolgirls in Kenya: Panicked health chiefs launch probe with 'sickened' pupils left shaking uncontrollably and convulsing (Daily Mail) https://tinyurl.com/msuersa4

COVID-19

♦ After Shunning Scientist, University of Pennsylvania Celebrates Her Nobel Prize (WSJ via Apple News) https://tinyurl.com/34ydf45s

♦ Interdisciplinary team receives $5 million grant to explore COVID-19 virus ecology at the human-animal interface (Science Magazine via Apple News) https://tinyurl.com/mrysvn27

♦ Maternal Covid-19 vaccination offers infants immunity for up to 6 months (STAT via AppleNews) https://tinyurl.com/2vzufuhd

♦ COVID Is Ramping Up for a Year of Deadly Surges (Daily Beast via AppleNews) https://tinyurl.com/2zsjn5j9

♦ Is COVID pandemic or endemic? (World Socialist News) https://tinyurl.com/yeyu47m6

♦ Study highlights gut fungi's lasting impact on severe COVID-19 immune response (Medical Xpress via AppleNews) https://tinyurl.com/3exmk368 -15-