Back to Annual Meeting

Back to Annual Meeting

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Hugh Tilson, MD, DrPH, Public Health Leadership Program, North Carolina School of Public Health, 200 North Greensboro St. - Suite D-4a, Chapel Hill, NC 27510, 919-966-9275, hugh_tilson@unc.edu

Do disparities in public health systems across the country—in terms of funding, workforce, and other aspects of infrastructure—affect the health of communities served by those systems? If one community can afford state-of-the-art information technology and performance management systems, will the community's health status improve compared to those who cannot afford or decide not to adopt them?

This session will highlight key research questions, like those geared towards better understanding the effects of and potential solutions to disparities in public health infrastructure. Research in these areas would build the science base for a stronger and more just public health system.

The Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice has convened a Public Health Systems Research (PHSR) Leadership Forum at each APHA Annual Meeting since 2001. The Forums present opportunities for individuals who conduct, finance, and use research to come together to draw attention to vital research needs.

This year's Forum will build on the Forum's prior contributions to add focus on prioritizing research needs to ensure that researchers and funders are concentrating on questions of disparity and inequity in systems, questions that the practice community has identified as urgently in need of research. In addition, it will discuss building the business case for investing in those priority research areas. Among the questions panelists and session participants may consider is how the field can demonstrate the return on investment of evidence-based, infrastructure-level interventions on building systems that can efficiently, effectively, and equitably protect and promote the public's health.

Learning Objectives: