Schools of Public Health and the Health of the Public: Enhancing the Capabilities of Faculty to Be Influential in Policymaking

摘要

Faculty members of schools of public health contribute to better health largely through their teaching, research, and community service roles. We suggest attention to another role: exerting their influence to ensure effective public health policy. Using recent actions taken at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health as a template, we describe some of the key steps that public health schools can take to help their faculties be more influential in public health policy. These steps include (1) building infrastructures to support and facilitate this role, (2) teaching faculty members how to be more influential in the policy arena, and (3) aligning incentives and rewards for faculty who contribute to improved public health by influencing the formation and implementation of public health policy. AS REFLECTED IN THEIR MIS sion statements, operations, and organizational behaviors, schools of public health seek to contribute to better health. The core pathway to this end is the teaching, research, and community service contributions made by the schools' faculties. The central theme of this article is that public health faculty can also help meet public health needs and goals through their influence on public health policymaking, but that many faculties need support and assistance to do so effectively. We acknowledge and celebrate the fact that some school of public health faculty members are extraordinarily successful at directly and indirectly influencing public health policymaking, through such means as conducting policy-relevant research and publishing the results in forms that policymakers can understand and use, including policy-relevant work in conference presentations, providing expert testimony before legislative bodies, serving on study groups and advisory committees, and relating their teaching and consulting to public health policymaking. We think more faculty should play such influential roles, and we describe steps being taken at the Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) at the University of Pittsburgh to facilitate this effort. If more faculty members are to help shape and influence public health policy for the better, their schools must help equip them to do so and provide a supportive environment in which they can undertake these activities. Broadly, these actions include 3 areas: (1) building infrastructures to support and facilitate faculty in helping to shape public health policy, (2) teaching faculty how to be more influential in the policy arena, and (3) aligning incentives and rewards for faculty to contribute to improved public health policy.