Developing a Culture of Health: Addressing Health Inequities Through a Health Department and Community Organizer Partnership

摘要

In the next frontier of public health, health departments will have to foster positive community transformation to discover and create "upstream" health solutions. First steps in creating these relationships include meeting with local organizers to learn about the concerns of their community and utilizing others to diversify skills, tools, research, and reach. Additional steps include bringing partnering agencies as close as possible in terms of physical space and giving partnerships time to achieve long-term change. In the year 2000, the Kansas City, Missouri Health Department (KCMOHD) looked into life expectancy data by zip code and found that white residents lived an average of 6.5 years longer than black residents.1 It was undeniable that the city's long-standing geographic racial divide had created a significant health inequity across the community, resulting in deaths attributed to social factors such as poverty, violence, and a lack of education. With this information, an ambitious goal to increase life expectancy and reduce health inequities was built into the city business plan, and the director of health sought to find a collaborator with expertise in bridging the racial and economic divide.