POPULATION HEALTH: Are these battles winnable?

An estimated 400,000 people quit smoking between 2012 and 2016 – one of the successful initiatives of the “Winnable Battles” campaign begun by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2010.  The outcomes of this program five years later are reviewed in this report and summarized in the JAMA article.  The idea was to target a carefully-chosen set of public health issues and then devote federal, state and local resources to improving them.

Here is a summary of what happened five years on:

1. Clear success in decreasing adult and teen smoking
2. Likewise, exceeded the target in decreasing teen pregnancies
3. Making good progress on most measures of reducing healthcare-associated infections – except catheter-associated urinary tract infections
4. Slow progress on measures related to nutrition, exercise, obesity
5. Slow progress on reducing foodborne illness
6. Slow progress on reducing motor vehicle deaths
7. Mixed results on measures related to HIV

Sources:

Winnable battles: Final report. (2016, November). Atlanta: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Click here: https://www.cdc.gov/winnablebattles/report/docs/winnable-battles-final-report.pdf; and, Frieden, T.R., Ethier, K., ad Schuchat, A. (2017, February 2). Improving the health of the United States with a “winnable battles’ initiative. JAMA. Click here: http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2601246  Posted by AHA Resource Center (312) 422-2050, rc@aha.org