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Public Health Practice – Advancing collaboration between public health and primary care to improve population health was the topic addressed by Dr. Don Bradley, MD, MHS-CL, a featured speaker at the 2015 Public Health Association of Nebraska (PHAN) annual meeting held in Kearney Nebraska. Dr. Bradley holds a position as an Associate Consulting Professor in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Duke and serves as Director for The Practical Playbook. Dr. Bradley described the vision of the Practical Playbook organization as public health and primary care engaging in robust, sustained, and effective collaboration, working together to achieve extraordinary gains in the health and well-being of people and their communities.

In order to improve the health and well-being of people and their communities, members of the Practical Playbook organization believe that:

1. Strong public health and primary care are essential for an effective health/wellness system
2. To achieve maximum impact on health, underlying [upstream] factors that affect health must be addressed
3. Community engagement is critical to success
4. Interdisciplinary, inter-sector teams, are most likely to drive improved health behavior and health
5. Evidence, data, and evaluation must drive prioritization of resources and efforts
6. Collaboration is hard, takes energy and time, but is worth the effort

Strategic Priorities of the organization include:

1. Increasing the awareness of the value of partnerships and collaboration
2. Growing thought and strategic leadership for collaboration between public health and primary care
3. Promoting/providing practical tools and resources that facilitate effective cross-sector collaboration
4. Identifying, evaluating, and widely disseminating stories of successes [and failures] regarding collaborative population health interventions
5. Connecting like-minded organizations to generate collaboration, creativity, and interventions at scale
6. Identifying and beginning implementation of a sustainable business model for the Practical Playbook and how it supports collaborative approaches
7. Supporting the training and development of health professionals that improve the health of the U.S. population.

The Practical Playbook is a stepping stone in the next transformation of health, in which primary care and public health groups collaborate to achieve population health improvement and reduced health care costs. Throughout each stage, the Practical Playbook provides helpful resources such as success stories from across the country, lessons-learned from existing partnerships, and further guidance from industry experts. To learn more visit: www.PracticalPlaybook.org

This article was written by Ellen Duysen, MPH, Coordinator, CS-CASH