Abstract
Public health is critical to a healthy, fair, and sustainable society.Realizing this vision requires imagining a public health community that can maintainits foundational core while adapting and responding to contemporary imperatives suchas entrenched inequities and ecological degradation. In this commentary, we reflecton what tomorrow’s public health might look like, from the point of view of ourcollective experiences as researchers in Canada who are part of an Applied PublicHealth Chairs program designed to support “innovative population health researchthat improves health equity for citizens in Canada and around the world.” We viewapplied public health research as sitting at the intersection of core principles forpopulation and public health: namely sustainability, equity, and effectiveness. Wefurther identify three attributes of a robust applied public health researchcommunity that we argue are necessary to permit contribution to those principles:researcher autonomy, sustained intersectoral research capacity, and a criticalperspective on the research-practice-policy interface. Our intention is to catalyzefurther discussion and debate about why and how public health matters today andtomorrow, and the role of applied public health research therein.
Highlights
Public health is critical to a healthy, fair, and sustainable society
Drawing on our collective experiences, we describe three necessary attributes of applied public health research that support our model in Fig. 1: researcher autonomy, sustained intersectoral research capacity; and a critical perspective on the research-practice-policy interface
We assert that applied public health research is best positioned to contribute meaningfully to the principles of sustainability, effectiveness, and equity if the attributes described below are in place
Summary
Public health is critical to a healthy, fair, and sustainable society. Public health’s role in this vision stems from its foundational values of social justice and collectivity (Rutty and Sullivan 2010) and—we argue—from its position at the interface of research, practice, and policy. Significant and entrenched forms of economic, social, political, and historical marginalization and exclusion (TRC 2015), coupled with inequitable and unsustainable patterns of resource consumption and technological development (CPHA 2015; Whitmee et al 2015), cause and perpetuate health inequities. These inequities underlie the longstanding recognition that the unequal distributions of health-damaging experiences are the main determinants of health (CSDH 2008; Ridde 2004).
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Schedule a callMore From: Canadian journal of public health = Revue canadienne de sante publique
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