What is Public Health Transformation?

Public health transformation requires reimagining and developing a common vision to ensure the mindsets, capacity, resources, and workforce necessary to provide equitable Foundational Public Health Services and 10 Essential Public Health Services, to advance health, wellbeing, and equity. It occurs through a fundamental shift in the way a public health system(s) is structured, functions and interacts through continuous quality improvement, innovation, partnerships, community-led efforts, and systems change.

Simply put, it requires sustaining what is working, building on what can be improved, and reimagining what could be so that all people and communities can thrive.

The Center for Innovation’s Transformation Efforts

It is time to do things differently, to envision all that public health can be, and to transform public health systems to best advance health and equity. PHAB’s Center for Innovation is supporting states in intentionally transforming and modernizing their governmental public health systems to create equitable public health systems and communities.

Our approach to transformation and modernization is through building and strengthening the governmental public health infrastructure and systems to create change that improves health for all. It requires centering equity, modernizing data systems, and equipping our health departments with the capacity to provide the Foundational Capabilities and the workforce needed to serve, rebuild trust, and be accountable to their communities.

Current efforts include using frameworks such as the Foundational Public Health Services (FPHS) and the 10 Essential Public Health Services, learning from communities like the 21st Century Learning Community, Cross-sector Innovation Initiative, and All In: Data for Community Health, utilizing the research from Staffing Up, and achieving PHAB accreditation.

New Strategies for Transformation

The Center for Innovation is expanding our transformation and modernization efforts to:

  • Actively recruit and onboard additional states to 21C;
  • Define public health transformation and what reimagined public health systems could look like on a state-by-state basis;

  • Engage up to three 21C state public health systems to begin implementing RWJF’s National Commission recommendations;

  • Develop a strategy and guide to support states in utilizing federal funding to intentionally advance modernization efforts;
  • Create opportunities for sharing emerging practices from states around service sharing, workforce models, costing and assessment, and more;
  • Foster an understanding of commonalities/differences in various transformation efforts to advance learning;
  • Identify opportunities for alignment across related initiatives.