Step into the year 2050! We are in the CDC Headquarters in Atlanta. The global public health profession has gone through tremendous transformation, and we have a lot to celebrate!
We’ve achieved drastic improvements in health outcomes across all populations and geographies. We have eradicated all known childhood and tropical illnesses including polio, malaria, among others. We’ve found the cure for most challenging health conditions such as HIV/AIDS, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes.
We are a holistically healthier and flourishing global community. This means we are well in our minds, bodies, and souls. Public health work is seen as a public value and professionals are generously compensated for their service to the world.
Public Health Workforce
The public health workforce is representative of the communities it serves, and public health leadership represents the broader public health workforce. Public health professionals’ primary focus is on creating environments that promote equity within and across communities as primary intervention for disease prevention.
We have cultivated empathetic skills and inclusive values to honor and respect the breadth of cultures, attitudes, and beliefs that all public health professionals and communities bring to public health work. We deeply value these differences as critical to co-creating effective and timely solutions to new and persistent public health challenges.
Additionally, compassion and relationality are held as primary values in the field of public health, and investing in people and relationships is prioritized over process-driven workloads. Spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical health are all seen as linked, interwoven, and necessary for creating conditions of well-being and human flourishing, both for communities and public health professionals. Public health professionals clearly see how their own inner work and healing is connected to and drives (or doesn’t) the healing we are trying to create in the world. Public health professionals are not asked nor silently expected to sacrifice their own well-being to create conditions of health and well-being for others.
Public Health Structures
Communities are living in racial, economic, and political harmony. Public health has been decentralized–there is much greater community responsibility and local councils and committees are responsible for highly localized public health governance and design.
The identification/prioritization of public health issues and implementation of public health initiatives are led by members of the communities where the work is needed. Public health problems are analyzed and solutions co-designed in community. Local councils and committees are comprised of the races, ages, and lived experiences present in the community. They set the metrics for success and measure them, calling in support as they feel they need it.
The sub-disciplines in public health are no longer siloed–we realize that we can only achieve public health wins if we go collectively, and we have found ways of working across disciplines to facilitate this. Climate science and public health are interwoven disciplines. Effective global coordination structures exist to respond to emergencies and outbreaks, and there is much greater public trust in government and its leadership to prevent and respond to future epidemics as a result of systemic change in community engagement, outbreak and surveillance management, and cross-sector coordination.
Lived experience is as important as cognitive and numerical ways of understanding public health issues. All research is carried out using mixed methods design with integrated and meaningful community participation throughout. Ancestral wisdom is valued and called upon. We are now walking the walk on community-based participatory research.
State of the World
The radical transformation in the ways public health is organized, its values and the way it is valued as a discipline, and the ways it carries out its work has achieved drastic improvements in health outcomes across all communities and geographies. Everyone has free access to comprehensive health care and has the tools, means, and abilities to access it.
Previously marginalized peoples enjoy full rights, autonomy, safety and security, and they are valued for the diversity they bring to the world. This includes women, indigenous communities, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and people living with disabilities. Men are free to be their full selves and free from the harmful socialization that enslaves them to be emotionally disconnected.
This journey is not over! We have better outcomes for things we know about. We now have a system that is prepared to respond to the diseases and public health needs of the future in more resonant, effective ways for local communities.