Moving From Public Health Surveillance to Action

Facilitating Public Health Action through Surveillance Dashboards

Introduction Traditionally, public health surveillance departments collect, analyze, interpret, and package information into static surveillance reports for distribution to stakeholders. This resource-intensive production and dissemination process has major shortcomings that impede end users from optimally utilizing this information for public health action. Often, by the time traditional repor...

Moving from Intersection to Integration: Public Health Law Research and Public Health Systems and Services Research

CONTEXT For three decades, experts have been stressing the importance of law to the effective operation of public health systems. Most recently, in a 2011 report, the Institute of Medicine recommended a review of state and local public health laws to ensure appropriate authority for public health agencies; adequate access to legal counsel for public health agencies; evaluations of the health ef...

Moving from Evidence to Action

Can Lessons from Public Health Disease Surveillance Be Applied to Environmental Public Health Tracking?

Disease surveillance has a century-long tradition in public health, and environmental data have been collected at a national level by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for several decades. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced an initiative to develop a national environmental public health tracking (EPHT) network with "linkage" of existing environmental and c...

Tackling health inequalities: moving theory to action

BACKGROUND This paper reports on health inequalities awareness-raising workshops conducted with senior New Zealand health sector staff as part of the Government's goal of reducing inequalities in health, education, employment and housing. METHODS The workshops were based on a multi-method needs assessment with senior staff in key health institutions. The workshops aimed to increase the knowle...