As National Center ramps up its work to demonstrate the value of team care and education, it is essential to engage the expertise and insights of public health professionals to ensure preventing disease and treating disease are considered together to improve health in our communities.

National Center leaders are hearing from colleagues around the country that what's missing is public health knowledge and skills among health providers. There is an strong need to improve population health and individual health at the same time. To do so, health providers need to know more about public health, and public health professionals need to know more about caring for patients one at a time.

Originally, public health was connected to medicine and taught in medical schools. As it evolved as a discipline in the early 20th Century, public health became separate from clinical care, and university schools of public health were established. Now considerable interest exists to reconnect them in integrated approaches to team education and care.

“What we’ve had up to this point is really two separate system working side by side, in silos,” explains University of Minnesota School of Public Health Dean John Finnegan, Ph.D. “The U.S. has excelled at building a very sophisticated—and very expensive—acute care system—right at the edge of the waterfall. Public health allows us to go upstream and proactively address our needs as a country through prevention and policy. Bringing together public health and care delivery is really the key to creating a health care system that values affordability, access and quality.”

National Center and public health leaders have begun conversations to shape the broader questions of how public health can contribute to the transformation of health care delivery. Stay tuned…