Importance of Partnerships Focus of Faces of Public Health Series

I was pleased to have the opportunity recently to discuss public-private partnerships with Fran Kritz for NewPublic Health, a blog of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A Q&A of our conversation is posted today, as part of their Faces of Public Health editorial series. I hope you'll read the full interview and leave your comments about the importance of partnerships in advancing health. I've included a brief excerpt from the discussion below.

NewPublicHealth: Why are partnerships so important for improving public health?

Charles Stokes: I’ve become convinced that we need to get away from segregating government from business and from the nonprofit sector. If we’re going to continue to be a leader in the world and do as much as we’ve gotten used to doing, it’s going to be through partnerships, and that takes a change in culture.

NewPublicHealth:  What is the incentive for businesses to get involved in public health?

Charles Stokes: I think we can bring more corporate partners to the table if more corporate leaders are aware of the impact of public health problems and solutions on their businesses. As someone who’s been on both sides of the table as a budget analyst listening to public health talk about itself and then as someone involved in selling public health, I think prevention and public health are terms that do not sell well. Nobody understands, and we in public health tend to bemoan the fact that nobody understands us. I think we’ve got to get over that, and we’ve got to begin to look at how do we take what CDC does and talk about that in a language that not just philanthropy, but, equally important, business understands and appreciates.

So a new key focus area for the CDC Foundation is to demonstrate how the health of our nation impacts the health of American businesses and our national economy. CDC [and public health] is vital to a healthy economy, helping employers and families reduce health care spending; fighting disease outbreaks that disrupt continuity of operations and reduce productivity; and providing proven guidelines and health data to help protect workers’ health and safety. At the CDC Foundation, we are working to identify opportunities to educate corporate leaders about how CDC keeps American communities — and American businesses — healthy, safe and secure. And about how they, as corporate leaders, can help. I think that’s extremely important.

Read the full interview on the NewPublicHealth blog.