Creating multi-disciplinary partnerships to promote healthy communities

The current obesity epidemic is the product of system failures across the sectors of public health, healthcare, and the community (including schools, parks and transportation). Despite the fact that great progress is currently being made in all of these areas, most strategies do not reach across disciplines to promote healthy eating and physical activity. The Healthy Weight Collaborative is a national learning collaborative that brings together 50+ teams from communities nationwide; each multi-sector team represents stakeholders from public health, the community (e.g., schools, parks, transportation), and clinical care. For this initiative, establishing productive partnerships between primary care, public health and community-based organizations will form the basis for sustainable, community, environmental and individual health behavior change that ultimately promotes healthy weight and health equity. In this session, we aim to teach public health professionals and other attendees the key elements of creating multi-disciplinary partnerships to promote consistent messaging across sectors in the promotion of healthy weight. We will use the Community Action Model to Promote Health to show linkages among the sectors and share the common nomenclature we have developed to bring teams together for this work. We will discuss the key features that have contributed to success for our trans-sectoral teams including: strong leadership, shared vision, standardized changes and metrics, and connection to a network of similar trans-sectoral teams. We will particularly focus on the successes and challenges of implementing a cohesive improvement strategy across disciplines, citing strategies for collaboration that have been tested in our initiative.