Systems thinking to improve the public's health.

Improving population health requires understanding and changing societal structures and functions, but countervailing forces sometimes undermine those changes, thus reflecting the adaptive complexity inherent in public health systems. The purpose of this paper is to propose systems thinking as a conceptual rubric for the practice of team science in public health, and transdisciplinary, translational research as a catalyst for promoting the functional efficiency of science. The paper lays a foundation for the conceptual understanding of systems thinking and transdisciplinary research, and will provide illustrative examples within and beyond public health. A set of recommendations for a systems-centric approach to translational science will be presented.

Practical challenges of systems thinking and modeling in public health.

OBJECTIVES: Awareness of and support for systems thinking and modeling in the public health field are growing, yet there are many practical challenges to implementation. We sought to identify and describe these challenges from the perspectives of practicing public health professionals. METHODS: A systems-based methodology, concept mapping, was used in a study of 133 participants from 2 systems-based public health initiatives (the Initiative for the Study and Implementation of Systems and the Syndemics Prevention Network). This method identified 100 key challenges to implementation of systems thinking and modeling in public health work. RESULTS: The project resulted in a map identifying 8 categories of challenges and the dynamic interactions among them. CONCLUSIONS: Implementation by public health professionals of the 8 simple rules we derived from the clusters in the map identified here will help to address challenges and improve the organization of systems that protect the public's health.