The new statewide initiative to create a healthier New York is covered by JLowe at the environmental health blog Impact Analysis. Program initiatives range from the usual suspects in chronic disease prevention to environmental health and infection control in healthcare facilities. Her depiction/expectation for the program sounded too authentic to be passed off as an attempt at humor:
I hope the state of New York can make disease prevention interesting and compelling. There’s something so liberal, earnest and dull about public health.
That's one of those quotable quotes I will be using from now on. As to the prescription?
There will need to be some out-of-the-box thinking to keep this from turning into another juiceless, marginally effective government program. One possibility might be to give it a social marketing spin.
Check out the social marketing links [hint: you won't have to go far]. Thanks for the vote of confidence and the desire to get out of the box! Social marketing has been used in New York state since at least the late 1980s when they based their first comprehensive heart disease prevention programs on the Pawtucket Heart Health Program [pdf]. More recently, social marketing has appeared in some of the HealthierNY programs.
Like all state and Federal agencies, bits and pieces of social marketing get practiced in a few corners of comprehensive efforts to improve public health. Will the leadership in New York have the courage (audacity?) to suggest and follow-through to throw out some of the public health boxes [see liberal, earnest and dull above] and employ social marketing as an enterprise wide effort? After all, the commercial sector doesn't practice marketing on just some of their products. A $200 million 'marketing budget' for public health can go a long way.
And welcome back to the blogging world Impact! The more public health voices in the b-sphere, the better.
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