Jose Pagan, PhD, Director of the Academy's Center for Health Innovation and Yan Li, PhD, a Research Scientist in the Center, explain the ability of their work to help us build a national culture of health on the Health Affairs blog.
Editor’s note: This is part of a periodic series of Health Affairs Blog posts discussing the Culture of Health. In 2014 the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced its Culture of Health initiative, which promotes health, well-being, and equity. The initiative identifies roles for individuals, communities, commercial entities, and public policy that extend beyond the reach of medical care into sectors not traditionally associated with health. Health Affairs is planning a theme issue in November 2016 that will explore various aspects of the Culture of Health.
The Culture of Health Action Framework, developed recently by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), focuses on improving the health and wellbeing of all Americans by supporting mobilization for collective change. The framework specifically focuses on four areas:
- Making health a shared value,
- Fostering cross-sector collaboration to improve well-being,
- Creating healthier, more equitable communities, and
- Strengthening the integration of health services and systems.
Moving forward in any of these areas—and their integration—to improve health requires new conceptual ideas as well as novel ways of organizing knowledge, combining insights, and developing solutions.
The main challenge to realizing this vision is determining how best to address the complexity of making all the moving parts work together in tractable ways. In creating a Culture of Health, we need to be able to know, in a timely fashion, what works and what does not work to improve health, why a given strategy succeeded or failed, and what changes are necessary to make meaningful progress.
Read the article.
View our COVID-19 Safety Protocols for attending NYAM public events.