Undergraduate Environmental Public Health Education

Author(s):  
Emily Q. Ahonen ◽  
Steven E. Lacey

Environmental, occupational, and public health in the United States are practiced across a fragmented system that makes work across those areas more difficult. A large proportion of currently active environmental and occupational health professionals, advocates, policy makers, and activists are nearing retirement age, while some of our major health challenges are heavily influenced by aspects of environment. Concurrently, programs that educate undergraduate college students in environmental health are faced with multiple, often competing demands which can impede progressive movement toward dynamic curricula for the needs of the twenty-first century. We describe our use of developmental evaluation to negotiate these challenges in our specific undergraduate education program, with the dual aims of drawing attention to developmental evaluation as a useful tool for people involved in environmental and occupational health advocacy, policy-making, activism, research, or education for change, as well as to promote discussion about how best to educate the next generation of environmental public health students.

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 5S-7S
Author(s):  
Jill Sonke ◽  
Lourdes Rodríguez ◽  
Melissa A. Valerio-Shewmaker

The arts—and the arts and culture sector—offer fertile ground for achieving a culture of health in the United States. The arts and artists are agents of change and can help enable this vision and also address the most critical public health issues we are contending with, including COVID-19 and racism. The arts provide means for engaging dialogue, influencing behaviors, disrupting paradigms and fueling social movements. The arts uncover and illuminate issues. They engage us emotionally and intellectually. They challenge assumptions. They call out injustice. They drive collective action. They heal—making arts + public health collaboration very relevant in this historic moment. In this special Health Promotion Practice supplement on arts in public health, you’ll find powerful examples and evidence of how cross-sector collaboration between public health and the arts can advance health promotion goals and impacts, and make health promotion programs not only more accessible to diverse populations but also more equitable and effective in addressing the upstream systems, policies, and structures that create health disparities. You will see how the arts can empower health communication, support health literacy, provide direct and measurable health benefits to individuals and communities, and support coping and resilience in response to COVID-19. This issue itself exemplifies cross-sector collaboration, as it was created through partnership between Health Promotion Practice, the Society for Public Health Education, ArtPlace America, and the University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine, and presents voices from across the public health, arts, and community development sectors.


2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 1064-1083 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marshall I. Steinbaum ◽  
Bernard A. Weisberger

Thomas Leonard's 2016 book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era argues that exclusionary views on eugenics, race, immigration, and gender taint the intellectual legacy of progressive economics and economists. This review essay reconsiders that legacy and places it in the context within which it developed. While the early generations of scholars who founded the economics profession in the United States and trained in its departments did indeed hold and express retrograde views on those subjects, those views were common to a broad swath of the intellectual elite of that era, including the progressives' staunchest opponents inside and outside academia. Moreover, Leonard anachronistically intermingles a contemporary critique of early-twentieth-century progressive economics and the progressive movement writ large, serving to decontextualize those disputes—a flaw that is amplified by the book's unsystematic approach to reconstructing the views and writing it attacks. Notwithstanding the history Leonard presents, economists working now nonetheless owe their progressive forebears for contributions that have become newly relevant: the “credibility revolution,” the influence of economic research on policy and program design, the prestige of economists working in and providing advice to government agencies and policy makers, and the academic freedom economists enjoy in modern research-oriented universities are all a part of that legacy. (JEL A11, B15, D82, J15, N31, N32)


2015 ◽  
pp. 26-27
Author(s):  
Julie K. Wood

Drawing on the experiences of hundreds of public health and primary care clinicians from across the United States, this book explains why population health is receiving so much attention from policy makers in states and federal agencies, the practical steps that clinicians and public health professionals can take to work together to meet the needs of their community, signs that you are on the right track (or not) and how to sustain successes to the benefit of patients, community members, and the health care and public health teams that care for them.


2015 ◽  
pp. 305-310
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Engel

Drawing on the experiences of hundreds of public health and primary care clinicians from across the United States, this book explains why population health is receiving so much attention from policy makers in states and federal agencies, the practical steps that clinicians and public health professionals can take to work together to meet the needs of their community, signs that you are on the right track (or not) and how to sustain successes to the benefit of patients, community members, and the health care and public health teams that care for them.


2015 ◽  
pp. 195-206
Author(s):  
Sharon G. Moffatt ◽  
Monica Valdes Lupi ◽  
Kathleen Nolan

Drawing on the experiences of hundreds of public health and primary care clinicians from across the United States, this book explains why population health is receiving so much attention from policy makers in states and federal agencies, the practical steps that clinicians and public health professionals can take to work together to meet the needs of their community, signs that you are on the right track (or not) and how to sustain successes to the benefit of patients, community members, and the health care and public health teams that care for them.


2015 ◽  
pp. 167-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Barnett ◽  
Sara Rosenbaum

Drawing on the experiences of hundreds of public health and primary care clinicians from across the United States, this book explains why population health is receiving so much attention from policy makers in states and federal agencies, the practical steps that clinicians and public health professionals can take to work together to meet the needs of their community, signs that you are on the right track (or not) and how to sustain successes to the benefit of patients, community members, and the health care and public health teams that care for them.


2015 ◽  
pp. 105-110
Author(s):  
Lara Snyder

Drawing on the experiences of hundreds of public health and primary care clinicians from across the United States, this book explains why population health is receiving so much attention from policy makers in states and federal agencies, the practical steps that clinicians and public health professionals can take to work together to meet the needs of their community, signs that you are on the right track (or not) and how to sustain successes to the benefit of patients, community members, and the health care and public health teams that care for them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 110 (7) ◽  
pp. 978-985
Author(s):  
Angela J. Beck ◽  
Jonathon P. Leider ◽  
Heather Krasna ◽  
Beth A. Resnick

As postsecondary tuition and debt levels continue to rise, the value proposition of higher education has been increasingly called into question by the popular media and the general public. Recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics now show early career earnings and debt, by program, for thousands of institutions across the United States. This comes at an inflection point for public health education—master’s degrees have seen 20 years of growth, but forecasts now call for, at best, stagnation. Forces inside and outside the field of public health are shifting supply and demand for public health master’s degrees. We discuss these forces and identify potential monetary and nonmonetary costs and benefits of these degrees. Overall, we found a net benefit in career outcomes associated with a public health master’s degree, although it is clear that some other master’s degrees likely offer greater lifetime earning potentials or lower lifetime debt associated with degree attainment. We outline the issues academic public health must engage in to successfully attract and train the next generation of public health graduates.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (Supplement_4) ◽  
Author(s):  

Abstract Look around EUPHA, or any other public health conference. Public health is difficult to define, in theory and in practice. Its boundaries are all blurred, whether with medicine, schools, environmental protection or workplace safety inspectorates. Too often, we overstate the similarities between public health systems among countries. Efforts to promote networks, good practice, and even basic coordination have been undermined for decades by misunderstandings born of different educational, organizational, financial and political systems. The lack of comparison, and comparative political analysis in particular, also means that countries can have very similar debates about the proper nature and scope of public health, an about who is to blame for deficiencies, without awareness of when they are distinctive and when they are actually part of larger trends. This project aims to identify and explain variation in the scope and organization of public health systems in selected high-income countries. Based on a formalized comparative historical analysis of Austria, France, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States, researchers in the study first mapped the various axes of divergence: workforce composition, organization, levels of government, relationship to medicine, and the extent to which public health encompassed adjacent areas such as environmental health and occupational health and safety. For each country we then followed both case studies (communicable disease control including vaccines, HIV/AIDS, tobacco control, diet and nutrition, occupational health and safety) as well as the legislative history of the public health field in order to identify its changing organization and scope. It then identifies the relative role of historical legacies, changing science, burden of disease and politics in explaining patterns of both divergence and convergence. This workshop presents four country specific case studies (France, Germany, United Kingdom and the United States) that identify the most important forms of variation and the political, scientific and professional drivers of convergence and divergence. Key messages Political organization and scope as images of public health are grossly under-researched and nonexistent in a comparative nature. Understanding the scope and organization of public health in different countries will permit better lesson-drawing and identification of relevant and effective levers of change.


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