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Leading organizational change towards health equity: A national organization's experience in health equity integration
Integrating health equity into an organization's programs and mission is critical to achieving organizational change towards health equity. The central objective of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO)'s strategic map is Strengthen the effectiveness, value, and relevance of state and territorial public health in promoting health equity and improving health outcomes. ASTHO developed a health equity strategic map to guide our work in health equity. ASTHO's internal Health Equity Workgroup (HEW), which consists of representatives from all program areas at ASTHO, led the organizational effort to integrate health equity into the public health program areas' grants and RFPs at ASTHO. This process involved using the health equity strategic map, developing a policy, toolkit and technical assistance for staff, and doing a process evaluation on ASTHO's CDC grant submission. A substantial portion of ASTHO's funding comes from the CDC grant workplan submission. Therefore, the HEW conducted a process evaluation of health equity integration to examin e whether there were any changes from the 2013 CDC submission and the 2012 CDC submission. Out of the 40 workplans submitted for the 2012 CDC Submission, 12 (30%) contained health equity terms. Out of the 44 workplans submitted for the 2013 CDC Submission, 26 (59%) contained health equity terms. An increase from 30% to 59% shows that there has been a substantial organizational push to make sure that the CDC grant workplans incorporated health equity. ASTHO will also measure the 2014 CDC workplan submissions to explore the continuing trend of health equity integration.
Learning Areas:
Administration, management, leadership
Conduct evaluation related to programs, research, and other areas of practice
Public health administration or related administration
Systems thinking models (conceptual and theoretical models), applications related to public health
Learning Objectives:
Explain the importance of health equity integration for organizations.
Describe the steps ASTHO took to move towards health equity integration.
Identify what facilitated and helped the health equity integration process at ASTHO and how it can be used in other organizations.
Keyword(s): Health Disparities, Organizational Change
Presenting author's disclosure statement:Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I manage the health equity program at ASTHO and I have lead the health equity integration process at ASTHO. I have an MPH and over ten years of professional experience in public health.
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.
