Public health vs public education
Monday, July 28, 2008Written by: David Ethan Greenblog
Last week I was fortunate to attend the annual Dorsey Hughes Symposium on public health, which may be the most high powered conference held in Colorado that lay people and the media have never heard of. Speakers included Denis Cortese, the CEO of the Mayo Clinic; Dr, Kenneth Cooper (the patron saint of the Aerobics movement); T.R. Reid (his documentary "Sick Around the World" debuted on PBS last month); national pollsters Celinda Lake (Dems) and Elizabeth Harrington (GOP); three doctors who made the "short list" to become US Surgeon General, etc.
One big take away is that the next public health crisis coming down the road is Type 2 diabetes, which is tied directly to obesity. And the dramatic rise in adult onset diabetes is tied directly to the fact that we are raising a generation of fatties. This, in turn, makes education a target for the public health community, both in terms of educating kids on the virtues of exercise and proper diet, and the schools in terms of providing kids with the opportunities to eat well and get fit. Therein lies the rub, because the public health folks have trouble understanding why it is so difficult for schools to provide PE and good food, just as anyone in education wonders why it is so damn hard to get an accurate bill from their insurer. Elaine Berman from the State Board and John Lange, Superintendent of Adams 12, tried to explain some of the challenges, but we’ve got a "Two Cultures" problem here with respect to using the schools to solve a public health issue.
The other big take away is that the public health community is way more sophisticated than public education in terms of thinking and problem solving systemically. No one at Dorsey Hughes would be dumb enough to stand up in the room and argue that we shouldn’t be collecting data on outcomes because it "can’t be quantified" or that the results would hurt the feelings of some interest group. The problems are at least as complex and chaotic as those faced in public education, but the level of discourse is much higher. I’ve attended a lot of education symposiums in Colorado and across the country, and they felt like middle school compared to grad school in terms of how the public health community thinks about how systems work and how one deconstructs and analyzes a problem.
Not sure why this is, although when I posed the question someone patronizingly pointed out that there’s bigger money at stake in our health system, and "money attracts smarter people." Sigh.
The Symposium is run by the Colorado Health Foundation and next year will relocate to Keystone and be renamed the Colorado Health Symposium. Definitely worth checking out.
