Innovation in Public Health: Blending the Tried and True with New Directions

Abstract

As Philadelphia welcomes the Pennsylvania Public Health Association’s annual meeting to Philadelphia, we are fortunate to have so many from the public health community together to reflect on some of our collective accomplishments, explore the public health challenges that lie ahead, and strategize on how best to meet those challenges and improve the health of all Pennsylvanians.

Public health—ensuring the conditions under which people can be healthy—addresses “old” problems while facing new challenges every day. For decades we have been working to improve birth outcomes, ensure food safety, reduce communicable and chronic disease burden, and respond to disasters. But along with those old standards are new issues: the increasing and complicated role of health disparities in chronic disease, new strains of bacteria and pathogens that threaten our food supply, natural disasters that occur with more frequency and devastation and often impact those least able to bounce back. We have long worked against products harmful to our public’s health, such as tobacco and guns; we are now challenged by new hazards from products such as toxic substances that end up in the hands of children, and sugar-sweetened beverages, a known contributor to childhood obesity. As these public health challenges rapidly evolve and the communities we serve have more complex needs, so too does our need evolve for new partnerships and public health allies, and for the knowledge and skills to be successful in our mission.