Seizing Opportunities to Reinvent Public Health
Dec 2, 2014, 10:57 AM, Posted by Susan Dentzer
“The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different,” wrote the late management guru Peter Drucker. To the list of society’s sectors that are struggling with that conclusion, add government-funded public health.
State and local health departments face growing challenges, including infectious disease threats such as Ebola and chikungunya; a rising burden of chronic illness; an increasingly diverse population; even the health impact of global warming. At the same time, fiscal constraints accompanying the 2007–2008 recession and its aftermath hammered local, state, and territorial health agencies, which lost nearly 30,000 jobs—6 percent to 12 percent of their total workforces—from 2008 to 2013.