Public Health Transformation and Rebuilding
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Local Public Health Agencies are the Engines Driving Healthy Communities
During the COVID-19 pandemic, people saw their public health agencies in action like never before. But outbreak response is just one of the ways these agencies support communities’ health and well-being. Local public health ensures that eating in restaurants is safe, warns residents when air quality is hazardous, and advocates for policies that prevent teens from taking up smoking. And this is just a fraction of the critical public health services that prevent illness, injury, or death. Public health responds to emergencies and health threats, but it is mainly focused on the future: working in partnership to create the conditions for community wellness, healthy families, economic prosperity, and happiness. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated just some of the unacceptable consequences of underfunding, ignoring, and politicizing public health. |
The BARHII Framework illustrates public health's domains of activity across social and environmental determinants of health (click for larger image).
The United States saw higher cases and higher deaths than almost any other country. Creating a strong public health infrastructure supported by sustained, predictable investments will prevent that from happening again. That infrastructure is also necessary to marshal the long-term, community-driven efforts that we need to tackle challenges like the opioid crisis, increasing rates of chronic disease, and racism.
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Click to learn more about Colorado's Core Public Health Services
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The Goal: Full Implementation of Colorado’s Core Public Health Services (CPHS)
Building on lessons learned from several states that initiated similar efforts, we aligned Colorado's existing Core Public Health Services with the nationally-recognized Foundational Public Health Services framework. The framework defines a public health system that is more equitable, effective, accountable, collaborative, and adaptable through a “minimum package of services” that every local public health agency should provide. This package is suite of skills, programs, and activities that – because our health systems, economies, and communities are all interconnected -- must be available everywhere for the system to work anywhere. |
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Getting There: The 2019 CPHS Needs Assessment and the Transformation Movement
In 2015, state and local public health leaders began exploring public health funding in Colorado in the context of significant population growth and emerging public health priorities. That work resulted in a movement to simultaneously transform the system and fund governmental public health predictably and sustainably. By 2019, we had fully defined Colorado’s Core Public Health Services. CALPHO and Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) then developed and conducted a comprehensive needs assessment to 1) Understand current statewide implementation and spending on core public health services, and 2) Estimate the cost to fully deliver core public health services statewide based on the current service delivery paradigm. The assessment revealed significant implementation gaps throughout the state, and an overall state-wide CPHS implementation of 61%. Learn more about the assessment here . |
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This work is supported in part by the Colorado Health Foundation.
