Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #102172

Robert W. Prentice, PhD, Partnership for the Public's Health, Public Health Institute, 505 14th Street Suite 810, Oakland, CA 94612, 510-451-8600, bprentice@partnershipPH.org

The Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative (BARHII) is a regional collaboration of public health directors, health officers and senior managers from six public health departments in the San Francisco Bay Area--Alameda County, City of Berkeley, Contra Costa County, Marin County, City and County of San Francisco and San Mateo County--who came together with a mission "to transform public health practice for the purpose of eliminating health inequities using a broad spectrum of approaches that create healthy communities." BARHII has decided to focus initially on nutrition and physical activity because it counts for a disproportionate burden of preventable disease in low-income communities of color, and because there is a developing movement targeting the obesity epidemic that enables public health departments to demonstrate the contributions they can make as well as influence that movement to attend more to health inequities. The structure of BARHII emphasizes a regional approach to both transforming the organizational structure and culture of public health departments and working collaboratively with community and agency partners to reduce health inequities. The regional structure also supports the ability of senior public health officials to more effectively influence key policy, planning and regulatory decisions that affect the public's health, as well as the way public discourse is shaped by the media.

Learning Objectives: Participants will be able to identify the value of local public health departments working together collaboratively at a regional level both for the contributions to building public health infrastructure and for more effective programmatic approaches to reducing health inequities. The outcomes of the session will include helping participants to

• Identify organizational changes and programmatic initiatives at the regional, county and community levels that are enhanced by regional collaboration.
• Describe contributions public health departments working together regionally can make to the elimination of health inequities, particularly through strategies that focus on broad social and environmental change.
• Distinguish among those activities that are most effectively carried out at the regional, county and/or community levels and how they combine into a comprehensive strategy. Learning objectives will include
  • Identify three public health department organizational change strategies that can be carried out under regional auspices.
  • Articulate three programmatic contributions public health departments can make to the elimination of health inequities.
  • Describe one key intervention strategy that can be carried out most effectively at each of the three (regional, county, community) levels in a regional approach.

  Keywords: Health Disparities, Collaboration

  Presenting author's disclosure statement:
  

  I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

  Regional Public Health Collaborations

  The 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition (December 10-14, 2005) of APHA