Thirty-Six Years After the 1988 IOM Future of Public Health : Stop Ruminating and Start Taking Action

The main goals of the Institute of Medicine's 1988 report The Future of Public Health^ are laudable and still necessary today. This report recognized that the mission of public health is "fulfilling society's interest in assuring conditions in which people can be healthy."1 (p7) To achieve this, all levels of the governmental public health fieldfederal, state, local, and tribal-must be engaged in addressing the defined core functions. One major concern, as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, is that 36years later, although we have made improvements, the overarching goals of the report remain aspirational. The COVID-19 pandemic brought into sharp focus the need for a cross-sector, multidisciplinary approach, and the American Public Health Association responded by organizing the Alliance for Disease Prevention and Response.2 The Alliance is a collaborative initiative focusing on advancing a strong public health system for everyone and includes 80 cross-sectoral organizations. The Alliance has received support from the CDC Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Skoll Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The Alliance's goal is to accelerate building a robust and resilient public health system that advances health and well-being for all. After extensive study and input from the public health community and crosssectoral and community-based partners, we believe a key next step is to launch a large cross-sectoral movement, including an action arm, the Campaign for the Public's Health, to expand active engagement and collaboration and champion advances in public health and equity. This will involve catalyzing community-level partnership, communicating a shared vision, and jointly advocating supportive policy and system building. Linchpins of these efforts are collaboration and alignment, avoiding redundancy, and identifying organizations ready to lead, champion, support, and amplify the work of others to reach shared goals.