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 | Recommendations for Starting an MPHI
Leslie M. Beitsch, M.D., J.D.
|  | Outreach Contacts
|  | Dec 12 2005 Presentation
Jay H. Glasser, Ph.D., M.S.
|  | Agency for Health Care Policy and Research
MPHI website
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| | Reprinted from September 2003: The Nation's Health, American Public Health Association
Initiative active at local, state levels
Joining medicine, public health together is a good fit
Jay Glasser, PhD, MS
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase from France. Negotiated by President Thomas Jefferson’s ministers with Napoleon Bonaparte for $15 million, the tract was so large it doubled the area of the United States.
Jefferson acted with resolve, despite his belief that the powers of the federal government were to be circumscribed. He had a broad vision of our country and nationuilding a mere 14 years after the U.S. Constitution was ratified.
Like the fledging republic of the United States in 1803, this is a time for public health to be expanded. We must act with resolve in the face of limited resources, external threats and the fragmented state of our health care system. One route to reaching our goals is by mobilizing community partnerships around shared ideas of health. A key example is the Medicine and Public Health Initiative, formed by APHA and the American Medical Association in 1994.
The Medicine and Public Health Initiative illustrates the power of an idea and individuals. The concept of the initiative was born in 1993 when Roy Schwarz, MD, then-vice president of AMA, gave a talk at the University of Texas Health Science Center on the estrangement of medicine and public health. APHA and AMA leaders in the Texas community sought to organize a broad national coalition to close the gap between the two disciplines. Currently, the Medicine and Public Health Initiative is placing an emphasis on state and local affiliates, drawing on the leverage of health groups working with communities and states as equal engines of creativity.
California has had its Medicine and Public Health Initiative in operation since 1998. The
Texas Public Health Association has made medicine and public health its theme for 2004, and Florida is exploring a state Medicine and Public Health Initiative. The themes of the Medicine and Public Health Initiative are health care access, racial and ethnic health disparities, prevention, health promotion, community health goals and work force and education opportunities. An open session on the Medicine and Public Health Initiative will be held on Nov. 17 during APHA’s 131st Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Let me know what opportunities exist in your state. As Jefferson said in an 1816 letter, “as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. (Otherwise) we might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy.” It is a fitting time and opportunity to fit our communities with the garments of collaborative, civics based health care for all.
Reprinted from September 2003: The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
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