Prevention, Policy, and Public Health

The greatest public health victories of the last century -- public sanitation, vehicle safety measures, limits on smoking and tobacco use -- have all been facilitated by public policies. While policy is an unparalleled tool for effecting change in public health, most professionals are unprepared to plan, apply, or study policy in a consequential way.

Prevention, Policy, and Public Health provides a basic foundation for students, professionals, and researchers to be more effective in the policy arena. It offers information on the dynamics of the policymaking process, theoretical frameworks, analysis, and policy applications. It also offers tools for advocacy and communication, two integral aspects of shaping policies for public health.

Organized around the leading risk factors for premature death and supplemented with illustrative case study examples, this book will help professionals and researchers understand the dimensions of policy, which can in turn inform the conduct of research and evaluation. These skills, combined with an understanding of opportunities and limitations within governments, can be highly applicable to designing effective policies and programs.

With current pressures to implement broad and sustainable public health improvements, policies are more important than ever for anyone in the study and practice of public health. This book can be considered a primer to truly understanding the connection between prevention, policy, and public health.

Amy A. Eyler, PhD, is an Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean of Public Health at the Brown School, Washington University in St. Louis. Her main research interests are health promotion through community policy and environmental interventions, with a focus on physical activity and obesity prevention. For over a decade, she served as Principal Investigator for the Physical Activity Policy Research Network (PAPRN), a national network of researchers to study the influence of policy on population physical activity. She is the Past Chair of the physical activity section of the American Public Health Association, a member of the American College of Sports Medicine and is a Certified Health Education Specialist.

Jamie F. Chriqui, PhD, MHS, is a Professor of Health Policy and Administration and a Fellow in the Institute for Health Research and Policy in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is considered a nationwide expert on public health policy surveillance and evaluation and has led or is involved with numerous nationwide studies examining public health policies and their impacts particularly on chronic disease risk factors including tobacco use, physical activity, diet and nutrition, obesity, and substance use. Her research is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She holds a B.A. in political science from Barnard College, Columbia University, an M.H.S. in Health Policy from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, and a PhD in policy sciences (health policy concentration) from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Sarah Moreland-Russell, PhD, is an Assistant Research Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Sarah is involved in several studies including those with national, state, and local level focus that assess public health policy implementation. Specifically, her research focuses on health policy analysis and evaluation, specifically regarding tobacco control and obesity prevention initiatives, organizational and systems science and evaluation, and dissemination and implementation of public health policies. Her work has been supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health and has made contributions to the need for local level public health policy adoption, strategies for disseminating results for more effective implementation of evidence-based policy, and the evaluation of public health programs.

Ross C. Brownson, PhD, is the Bernard Becker Professor of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis. He is involved in numerous community-level studies designed to understand and reduce modifiable risk factors such as physical inactivity, obesity, and tobacco use. In particular, he is interested in the impacts of environmental and policy interventions on health behaviors and he conducts research on dissemination of evidence-based interventions. His research is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.