268265 Together for tomorrow's health: The urgent need for a common agenda for medicine and public health: The USA and UK experiences

Tuesday, October 30, 2012 : 11:30 AM - 11:50 AM

Phil Mackie, BA FRSPH FFPH , NHS Health Scotland, Scottish Public Health Network, Glasgow, United Kingdom
Alexander Gatherer, MD FFPH , Green Templeton College, Oxford, Retired. Former Hon Visiting Fellow, University of Oxford, UK, Warrington, Cheshire, United Kingdom
Jay H. Glasser, MS, Phd , School of Public Health, The University of Texas, Houston, TX
In the USA and United Kingdom the health of the public faces a climate of ambiguity induced by contradictory currents of change: an increased role for prevention in a time of austerity produces a push-pull for the delivery of public health. The introduction of major health reform legislation and budget constraints challenge both the delivery of public health and health care services. There is a renewed call for integrated health services, reflecting a principal foundation for health reform. What is new is an increased attention to promote a common agenda for medicine and public health. (1) How this imperative can seize on both the opportunities under health reform and the challenges introduced through the rocky cross eddies of cuts and controversy is the theme for this session. In the US, the landmark Affordable Care Act brings both promise of expansion of preventive care as the sections of the act come on line, yet local and national budgets, demographic dynamics and political and legal challenges carry portends of deterioration in the delivery of essential public health services. In the United Kingdom similar patterns of budget austerity coincide with major proposed changes as part of sweeping changes in the National Health Service, the public health function is leaving the NHS and going back to local government. This session identifies the common challenges for health professions to renew efforts to build collaborative partnerships between the public health and health care systems to preserve and advance essential population health programs though integrated approaches to disease prevention as an important goal for both services. The papers and discussion will set the stage for a continuincross Atlantic collaboration: • Changing the climate for collaboration, the past and current programs to build collaboration among health professions in the United States and globally the Medicine and Public Health Initiative (MPHI) experience. Jay H Glasser. President MPHI; Past APHA President

• Developing a common agenda in the UK and Western Europe for health systems to counteract the marked trend towards a separation of public health from health services with a more competitive- collaboration approach- : Phil Mackie, Lead Consultant, the Scottish Public Health Network; co-editor, the international journal Public Health

• The dictum that ‘community medicine/public health needs clinical medicine and clinical medicine needs a community' (2) underlines the importance of close work between the two. Speaker: Alex Gatherer, former MOH and public health physician.

Learning Areas:
Advocacy for health and health education
Chronic disease management and prevention
Clinical medicine applied in public health
Protection of the public in relation to communicable diseases including prevention or control
Provision of health care to the public
Public health or related public policy

Learning Objectives:
1.List the expected gains from medicine and public health working to a common agenda 2. Develop a plan for encouraging health systems to adopt a common agenda approach between their main medical and public health services 3. Identify the barriers which might reduce the uptake of a common agenda approach

Keywords: Public Health, Medical Care

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I and a UK trained Public health specialist with 20 years experience in academic and service based public health practice. I have worked in local, regional and national organisations dealing with both primary and public health care delivery.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.