Identifying asymptomatic healthcare workers with COVID-19 in a community hospital: an institution's experience.

The outbreak related to SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 has been classified as a pandemic. Many healthcare institutions enacted policies to limit the spread within their facility. As hospitals begin to return to normal particularly with elective procedures, a common concern is how an organization should react in the event that healthcare workers test positive for COVID-19. When our organization had a cluster of positive inpatient healthcare workers, we elected to test all direct patient care healthcare workers. Through this process we learned two valuable lessons that have redefined our practice: 1) the recognition that aggressive contact tracing provides greater yield than testing everyone and 2) organizations must implement effective social distancing both within each department and how departments interact with each other to limit the scope of contract tracing.

California's historic effort to reduce the stigma of mental illness: the Mental Health Services Act.

In a historic effort to reduce the stigma of mental illness, California voters approved the Mental Health Services Act in 2004. The law funds a comprehensive statewide prevention initiative that places stigma and discrimination reduction at its center, with 25 projects providing interventions at the institutional, societal, and individual levels. Stakeholders selected specific strategies from the research-based California Strategic Plan on Reducing Stigma and Discrimination. Strategies range from social marketing to increase public knowledge to capacity building at the local level, including training that emphasizes participation by consumers of mental health services and cultural competence. Collectively, these strategies aim to foster permanent change in the public perception of mental illness and in the individual experience of stigma. We examined the context, planning, programming, and evaluation of this effort.

Data synthesis in community health assessment: practical examples from the field.

State and local health departments (LHDs) are increasingly conducting community health assessments, using models such as Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships. Within the peer-reviewed literature, relevant Web sites, and textbooks on health planning, there is limited practical guidance for bridging data collection and prioritization. The purpose of this article was to provide examples of how LHDs have bridged these steps through "data synthesis." We provide examples from 3 LHDs that have extensive experience with the Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships model. The LHDs provide a detailed synopsis of data synthesis activities, including the setting, participants, processes, and outcomes. Commonalities between the LHDs' processes emerged, including daylong (or more) retreats, multiple nominal group-like techniques, and iterative approaches to reduce the number of strategic issues. These processes provide examples of data synthesis and are relevant to current practice, given the national voluntary accreditation process and the new nonprofit hospital requirements to conduct community health assessments.

The Local Public Health System Assessment of MAPP/The National Public Health Performance Standards Local Tool: a community-based, public health practice and academic collaborative approach to implementation.

The Local Public Health System Assessment (LPHSA) in Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships (MAPP), and the Local Tool of the National Public Health Performance Standards Program (LT/NPHPSP)--which are one in the same-attempt to assess the capacity to provide the essential public health services. Both tools have been utilized in various public health practice settings; however, users have been challenged with the complexity of the tools and time and human resource investment necessary to complete them. The recent Journal of Public Health Management and Practice issue focus on MAPP provided several examples of LPHSA implementation, both as a component of MAPP and as a stand-alone activity in the context of performance standards. The uniqueness in our approach involved a collaborative between a community-based organization, a public health academic program, and a governmental public health agency which conducted the LPHSA in a manner that did not require actual modification of the tool itself, was practical and feasible, and was of benefit and value to all partners.

Students in the community: MAPP as a framework for academic-public health practice linkages.

The importance of establishing and sustaining academic-public health practice linkages has been a point of emphasis in the Institute of Medicine reports on public health in 1988 and in 2003. One likely barrier to fostering such linkages is the absence of a clear framework that matches academic requirements to practice realities. This article describes how an academic-public health practice collaborative has used MAPP in a health planning course for Master of Public Health students over a 3-year period, allowing students the opportunity to work in communities with public health practitioners. The specific focus for each of these 3 years has varied, but underlying the work has been a consistent approach to teaching and working in communities with MAPP as the frame of reference. The outcome of this work has been of value to students and faculty, to public health department staff, and, most important, to the communities where this work has taken place. This suggests that there is great potential for using MAPP as a framework for establishing and strengthening academic-public health practice linkages.