“We understand that when people come in the door, that there are some things going on that may get in the way of what we are trying to do. So one of the visions is that everybody will understand this.
I think our entire hospital will be a place where everybody gets it, and everybody gets an opportunity to be the best they can be.”
Thea James, MD, Vice President of Mission, Boston Medical Centre
As we begin to understand the true drivers of population health, it is important that those within the health care system are empowered with the knowledge, tools and structures to help advocate for a more holistic approach to health care.
Health Leads is an organization working to do just that. Their flagship campaign is “What Counts”, is an initiative based on a film by Nicole Newnham & Jenni Heywood highlighting health systems in the United States that are dedicated to addressing the social determinants of health. The film is accompanied by a discussion guide made for care providers, organizations and citizens to fully engage with concepts and strategies around improving population health.
As someone interested in how to best translate knowledge, especially around population health, I think this film is particularly compelling because it features multiple perspectives from different levels of the systems, including very specific insights into day-to-day operations of people: Health system leaders describing their programs, footage of programs in actions, and interviews with patients with specific population health needs, and how their lives were changed from these initiatives.
This approach really speaks to the heart of what Dr. James mentions in the film (the quote above): There needs to be a change in individuals’ (within health care systems) thinking about what a health system ought to be good for, and a movement to provide structures within health care to help population health practice flourish. This emphasis on practicality – investigating the day-to-day operations of individuals within a system – represents, to me, a durable way to approach changing health care as we know it.
Presently, I feel that the population health research enterprise is still too far removed from the practicality of systemic and individual changes in health systems. Too much emphasis on programs and interventions, as if they are self-fulfilling entities, take us away from realizing that it is actually human-beings operationalizing population health practice, within systems designed to accomplish other ends.
I hope to further flesh this idea out in relation to what social-change academics call ‘theories of change’, further in later posts, so stay tuned!
Enjoy the film! I know I did.
A Population Health Blog 