The California Endowment’s “Building Healthy Communities” is addressing and eliminating disparities through efforts that change community conditions to become healthier, rather than on a focus on clinical health care coverage.
Achieving health equity means changing the odds for people, rather than expecting people to beat the odds.
Umair Shah’s story isn’t an uncommon one in public health. Starting out in medicine, with a career as an emergency department doctor, he said it quickly became clear that most of what impacts our health happens outside the hospital and in the community.
As public health practitioners increasingly look upstream to identify the determinants that put people on a trajectory toward lifelong health and wellbeing, early childhood is often tapped as a pivotal intervention point. Now, a new tool is available that practitioners can use to measure neighborhood-level opportunity indicators that are fundamentally linked to children’s health.