Supporting CBOs and Public Health Departments During COVID and Beyond
New Report Highlights Importance of Supporting CBOs & Public Health Departments During COVID & Beyond
Years of inadequate funding left our nation’s public health systems ill-prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is also a real opportunity to rebuild better, creating a new foundation for lasting, transformative change, community resilience, and equity.
A new report, Supporting Communities and Local Public Health Departments During COVID-19 and Beyond: A Roadmap for Equitable and Transformative Change, released today by Public Health Institute’s Public Health Alliance of Southern California, offers policy, program, and resource recommendations, and best practice examples, ensuring that local public health departments are adequately prepared to protect communities most vulnerable to the health and socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 as well as future public health emergencies.
Click to send a tweet: Investing in community-based orgs & local health depts is critical to create a new #PublicHealth foundation to build lasting, transformative change, community resilience & equity, says a new @PHIdotorg report: →
“This report serves as a critical resource for government and healthcare agencies, public health departments, and community serving groups to be able to effectively plan for long-term recovery from public health emergencies, such as COVID, and to ensure that local public health departments (LHDs) are adequately prepared to protect communities most vulnerable during a public health crisis,” said Tracy Delaney, PhD, the founding executive director of the Public Health Alliance of Southern California.
Some of the recommendations from the report include:
Significantly increasing funding (especially flexible funding) for public health departments and communities to advance health equity
Building a resilient and equity-focused public health workforce
Embedding “equity” in local health department emergency planning, response and recovery processes
Advancing health equity through community-informed policies and practices
Building effective partnerships between public health and healthcare
The report serves as a roadmap to help transform systems from a short-term public health crisis response to longer-term recovery, with equity at the very center. This transformation requires co-visioning and co-creating with community members to ensure that the needs and priorities of communities most disproportionately impacted by inequities are the leading force of these reimagined systems.
“Partnerships with [community-based organizations] were essential to the effectiveness of our outreach program so far and supplemented deficits in culturally informed staffing and linguistic challenges for our department staff, explained one of the local health department respondents. Our outreach efforts were effective because of widespread buy-in from the community partners who work closely with vulnerable groups,” they explained.
The report was commissioned by the California Department of Public Health’s Office of Health Equity and includes 68 key informant interviews from across California’s public health, community, healthcare, philanthropy, and other sectors, along with more than one hundred survey responses; local, regional, and state level public health professional meetings; and a scan and review of policy and best practices.