scholarly journals Toward a Culture of Health in the United States: Introducing the HPP Arts in Public Health Supplement

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.

10.2196/18401 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (8) ◽  
pp. e18401
Author(s):  
Jane M Zhu ◽  
Abeed Sarker ◽  
Sarah Gollust ◽  
Raina Merchant ◽  
David Grande

Background Twitter is a potentially valuable tool for public health officials and state Medicaid programs in the United States, which provide public health insurance to 72 million Americans. Objective We aim to characterize how Medicaid agencies and managed care organization (MCO) health plans are using Twitter to communicate with the public. Methods Using Twitter’s public application programming interface, we collected 158,714 public posts (“tweets”) from active Twitter profiles of state Medicaid agencies and MCOs, spanning March 2014 through June 2019. Manual content analyses identified 5 broad categories of content, and these coded tweets were used to train supervised machine learning algorithms to classify all collected posts. Results We identified 15 state Medicaid agencies and 81 Medicaid MCOs on Twitter. The mean number of followers was 1784, the mean number of those followed was 542, and the mean number of posts was 2476. Approximately 39% of tweets came from just 10 accounts. Of all posts, 39.8% (63,168/158,714) were classified as general public health education and outreach; 23.5% (n=37,298) were about specific Medicaid policies, programs, services, or events; 18.4% (n=29,203) were organizational promotion of staff and activities; and 11.6% (n=18,411) contained general news and news links. Only 4.5% (n=7142) of posts were responses to specific questions, concerns, or complaints from the public. Conclusions Twitter has the potential to enhance community building, beneficiary engagement, and public health outreach, but appears to be underutilized by the Medicaid program.


2021 ◽  
pp. 152483992110461
Author(s):  
Alice Fiddian-Green ◽  
Aline Gubrium

This special collection of Health Promotion Practice introduces critical narrative intervention (CNI) as a key theoretical framing for an asset-based, narrative, and participatory approach to promoting health and addressing social inequality. Innovative digital and visual methodologies highlighted in this special collection—comics and graphic novels, cellphilms and other participatory film, story booths, digital storytelling, and photovoice—are changing the way critical public health researchers and practitioners forge new knowledge, creating new possibilities for interdisciplinary and activist-based inquiry. Public health research and engagement efforts that critically contend with historically repressive structures and intervene through narrative and participatory processes to enact change with and for disenfranchised communities are long overdue. This special collection showcases six CNI projects that promote equity and justice in the context of LGBTQ, nonbinary, and other gender-diverse young people; people who inject drugs living with hepatitis C virus; young women who trade sex; undocumented and formerly undocumented immigrants; and people living with HIV/AIDS. It is our intent that this collection of exemplars can serve as a guidepost for practitioners and researchers interested in expanding the scope of critical public health praxis. Individually and collectively, the special collection illustrates how CNI can create space for the increased representation of historically silenced populations, redress stigma, and provoke important questions to guide a new era of health equity research.


1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 277-284
Author(s):  
Joseph-Marie Ndi Okalla

AbstractThis essay is in honour and in memory of the late Prof. Dr. Engelbert MVENG Sf. Born in Cameroon on May 9, 1930, Fr. Mveng has been found murdered in Yaoundé on April 23, 1995 before he would turn 65 years old. In the last thirty years, he was professor at the University of Yaoundé/Cameroon, Department of History. As a historian and theologian, he has enormous contributions to African culture and history, especially in the realm of cultural and religious anthropology as well as in iconology, which have won a wide acclaim. The internationally renowned artistic work of Fr. Mveng which can be found in different churches, chapels and educational centers the world over, underlines the iconographic contribution of Africa to the world and to Christianity. See, for example: Our Lady of Africa in the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth/Israel; the Jesuit Hekima College in Nairobi/Kenya; Uganda Martyrs Altar at Libermann, Douala/Cameroon; Our Lady of the Yaoundé Cathedral/Cameroon; the decoration of the chapel of the Catholic University of Central Africa, Yaoundé/Cameroon ... and various centers in Africa and in the United States ... I have presented the first version of this essay on the occasion of a visit of John Paul II to Cameroon. I enclose a selected bibliography of the writings of Fr. Engelbert Mveng.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-69
Author(s):  
Ellen M. Capwell ◽  
Carol Cox ◽  
Alyson Taub ◽  
M. Elaine Auld ◽  
Elias Berhanu

The Society for Public Health Education and American Association for Health Education Baccalaureate Program Approval Committee (SABPAC) provided a valuable service to the health education profession in the United States for 27 years. From 1987 to its sunset in 2014, SABPAC offered a voluntary process whereby undergraduate community/public health education professional preparation programs could seek review and evaluation of their programs against published national health education criteria. Those programs meeting SABPAC criteria were granted “Approval.” SABPAC approval was instituted as one way by which the health education profession could strive to promote consistent professional preparation in the field and ensure that health education graduates were prepared for contemporary workforce demands. Over the years, SABPAC chairs, committee members, and volunteers devoted countless hours reviewing self-studies and conducting on-site visits of professional preparation programs and documenting how they met SABPAC criteria and/or could enhance compliance with guidelines. Seeking SABPAC approval provided many program benefits. Recognizing that accreditation is the “gold standard” in education, the health education profession applied a thoughtful and researched process beginning in 2001 to transition from SABPAC approval to undergraduate accreditation through the Council on Education for Public Health. Three national task forces developed recommendations, conducted events to foster communication about the change, and assisted professional preparation programs to prepare for and seek the Council on Education for Public Health accreditation. This brief article documents the genesis, organization, and processes of SABPAC in the United States, until its sunset as a major contributor to quality assurance in health education for more than a quarter of a century.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enahoro A. Iboi ◽  
Ariana Richardson ◽  
Rachel Ruffin ◽  
DeAndrea Ingram ◽  
Jailyn Clark ◽  
...  

AbstractThe coronavirus outbreak in the United States continues to pose a serious threat to human lives. Public health measures to slow down the spread of the virus involve using a face mask, social-distancing, and frequent hand washing. Since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been a global campaign on the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to curtail the spread of the virus. However, the number of cases, mortality, and hospitalization continue to rise globally, including in the United States. We developed a mathematical model to assess the impact of a public health education program on the coronavirus outbreak in the US. Our simulation showed the prospect of an effective public health education program in reducing both the cumulative and daily mortality of the novel coronavirus. Finally, our result suggests the need to obey public health measures as loss of willingness would increase the cumulative and daily mortality in the US.


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