HEALTH For All: Health Professional Education's Assets Leveraged Toward Health For All

Supported in part by a grant from the Corporation for National and Community Service

January 2000 marked the launch of the Healthy People 2010 Objectives for the Nation, which set the nation's public health goals for the next decade: to increase quality and years of healthy life; and to eliminate health disparities that are associated with race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Achieving these goals will require community partnerships that involve ordinary citizens, grass roots organizations, community agencies, hospitals and health systems, businesses, government, philanthropy and other partners. U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher has specifically called upon health professional schools to be essential partners in achieving the Healthy People 2010 objectives.

Community-Campus Partnerships for Health's 5-year strategic plan called upon the organization to promote partnerships between communities and health professional schools that advance the Healthy People 2010 Objectives for the Nation. For example,

• Through service-learning, community-campus partnerships can engage students in academically-based community service that is preparing them to be culturally competent change agents.
• Through community-based participatory research, community-campus partnerships can understand and solve real-world public health concerns.
• Through their involvement in broad-based "healthy communities" coalitions, community-campus partnerships can improve health and quality of life.
• Through clinical and community service, community-campus partnerships can promote health and address the root causes of illness and disability at the individual and community level.

• Conducted discipline-specific service-learning institutes involving teams of faculty members and community partners:
  • March 2001 in Chicago, cosponsored by the American Dental Education Association
  • April 2001, cosponsored by the Association of Schools of Public Health
  • July 2001 in Toronto, cosponsored by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy
• Provided ongoing service-learning training and technical assistance through the CCPH Consultancy Network of trainers and consultants.
• Developed print and web-based resources for service-learning partnerships in the health professions.
• Formalized partnerships with national associations in health professions education that identified how we will collaborate to advance service-learning partnership in their particular discipline.

• Continued to conduct discipline-specific service-learning institutes involving teams of faculty member and community partners, with institutes planned in the disciplines of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, physical therapy and public health.
• Selected faculty and community leaders to serve as the inaugural class of CCPH Fellows. Fellows are serving in three important roles: as service-learning leaders and advocates within their national associations; as knowledgeable experts, providing training and consultation to CCPH members and completing special projects; and as advisors to CCPH by sharing their ideas for new program and policy development.
• Supported the development of conference tracks, special interest groups, theme journal issues, institutional policy development, and other activities designed to advance service-learning partnerships in specific health disciplines.
• Supported the development of Regional Networks of members.

In our third year we...

• Continued to support the above activities.
• Provided seed funding to start 4 Regional Networks of our members.
  

• Developed a draft Healthy People 2010 Curriculum Guide that faculty and community partners can use to integrate Healthy People objectives into classroom-based and community-based curricula.

In our second program year, we...

• Published a Toolkit
• Published the Healthy People 2010 Curriculum Guide
• Provided training and technical assistance to faculty and community partners on service-learning partnerships that advance the Healthy People 2010 objectives

In our third program year, we...

• Continued building upon the above-mentioned activities
• Served on a national Healthy People Curriculum Task Force

• Expanded our support for CCPH's Consultancy Network of trainers and consultants by hiring a full-time coordinator. A greater emphasis has been placed on training and consultation with community-based organizations and their national associations, building their capacity to engage and sustain higher educational institutions as partners.

• Participated in and presented at the American Association of Higher Education's Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards in February 2001.
• Develop a draft Community Scholarship Portfolio for faculty to document their community scholarship for promotion and tenure.
• Identified senior faculty engaged in community scholarship to serve as mentors and peer reviewers to junior faculty.

In our second program year, we…

• Launched a Community Scholarship Resources Page on the CCPH website.
• Selected a CCPH fellow who is conducting research and developing a Community Scholarship Toolkit that will include definitions, standards of assessment, products, methods of documentation, case studies and CVs of faculty engaged in community scholarship.

• Continued building upon the above-mentioned activities.