Alumni Profile

There are a lot of ways to stay healthy in Portland, Oregon, and Dave Houghton seems to have a hand in most of them. If you eat at a restaurant without getting sick, he has probably helped to make sure that your food was prepared in a clean kitchen. If you know how to seek out an immunization, or how to avoid a sexually transmitted disease, chances are he has played a role in your education. And if a public health emergency arose, Dave's plans would be protecting you.

As the Director of Community Health Services for Multnomah County Health Department, Dave oversees communicable disease, immunizations, tuberculosis prevention, public health emergency preparedness, early childhood services, HIV and STD prevention including syringe exchange, and the control of disease vectors like mosquitoes and rats—just to name a few of his responsibilities.

Keeping up with all this would seem to be occupation enough for any senior administrator. But Dave sees the many components of his job not as challenges but as opportunities to explore ways that our health system can better serve the public. He's energized by new perspectives and says that one of his successes is having hired "really smart young people" who know how to work creatively with hard-to-reach communities. It would be an understatement to call some of these projects "untraditional"—leading teenagers, for example, to create a MySpace page devoted to education about STD prevention—but this may be the key to their effectiveness.

Dave's passion for innovation extends not only to providing better services, but also to providing them in a more focused way. Since his first days as a healthcare professional, when he took the only job available to a recent nursing school graduate and ended up working as a mental health nurse in a jail, he's been concerned with public health inequities. His effort to help public health reach underserved populations has taken many forms, from working as a nurse in a refugee clinic to hiring Multnomah County's first bilingual public health outreach worker in an effort to curb the spread of tuberculosis among Spanish-speaking immigrants.

Recently, he and his colleagues have begun working on a much larger scale to remedy health inequities. The Multnomah County Health Equity Campaign brings attention to the urgency and to the far-reaching consequences of social factors such as income inequality and racism that operate "upstream" from health outcomes. Along with government officials and business and community leaders, the campaign hopes to reach the general public through community dialogues tied to an upcoming public television series on the same subject called Unnatural Causes.

This work is important, Dave says, because it "gives us an opportunity to make a stronger effort at prevention." Public health agencies "will keep doing well at the things we're already good at—we have to be good at keeping immunization rates where they need to be, and we will." But working with communities in innovative ways to remedy disparities and improve levels of education, prevention, and care—"those are things that are really exciting."