Session Overview: Healthy People 2020 across the Life Span

The Healthy People 2020 framework, a national agenda that communicates a vision for improving health and achieving health equity, provides an opportunity for assessing the health of each community as well as the health of the nation as a whole. It includes a set of specific, measurable objectives with targets to be achieved over the decade, with objectives grouped into topic areas. This rich resource has vast potential for use in assessing the extent to which we as a society collectively assure the conditions in which people across the life span can be healthy. However, the Healthy People 2020 - National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) Partnership, started in 2011, has identified, through a survey of the Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships social network site members, that Healthy People 2020 materials tend to be underutilized in community health assessment and community health improvement activities. After an overview of Healthy People 2020, presenters will discuss the development of implementation strategies and show how local health departments and other public health planners can use Healthy People to gauge their success in community health assessment and community health improvement planning. Attention to the leading health indicators, and in particular, objectives within the topic area of mental health, will be addressed.