Back to Annual Meeting

Back to Annual Meeting

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Daniel Swartzman, JD, MPH, School of Public Health, University of Illinois, 1603 W. Taylor, Chicago, IL 60612 and Sherry E. Weingart, MPH, University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, 1603 West Taylor Street, Chicago, IL 60612, 773-588-8577, sweingar@uic.edu.

Decision-makers within public health organizations and partnerships often operate within a contentious policy context, where choices are shaped by resource scarcity. Administrators, managers, researchers, advocates and other public health leaders face multiple simultaneous challenges in an era of budget contraction and competition for the public's attention. Among these is the need to strengthen their constituencies in order to effectively support policy and program choices, even those which public health leaders have thought were settled issues, including fundamental human rights. Identification and defense of the values and ethics which underlie social choices is as important a communication process as is providing best evidence of a policy or program's effectiveness. This is true because policy-makers, as well as members of public health organizations and community partnerships, do not evaluate positions and make decisions based solely on epidemiologic evidence. There is also a growing need for all public health workers to achieve greater competency in ways of communicating core public health values and methods, as popular discussions of asset rationing/hording and quarantine and isolation become more widespread. A formal “Values Identification Audit” (VIDA-PH) process can be conducted within the public health organization, or with community participation to increase collaborative decision-making, accountability and transparency. VIDA-PH includes self-study exercises and templates, which pose questions of escalating difficulty for the group's leadership. Model practice guidelines will be offered for exploring tough values-related issues and integrating the resulting decisions into an organization's internal structure and external activities and relationships. Continuous monitoring is suggested, using a report card.

Learning Objectives: