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In tough times, start from scratch: UNC public health webcast

March 09, 2009

Due to the economic crisis, local public health programs are facing significant declines in revenue at the same time that demands for their services are increasing.

Public Health Survival: Leadership in a Falling Market

In response, the story of the innovative approach taken by the Tulsa City-County Health Department in Oklahoma is the subject of Public Health Grand Rounds, an online broadcast series from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Global Public Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta and the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

The webcast is scheduled for March 24 at 2 p.m. EDT. The program is free, but registration is requested.

Called "Clean Sheet Exercise: A Tool for Local Health Department Planning," the webcast examines a project in which Tulsa public health workers were posed the question: "If we were to create a local health department from scratch today, how would we organize ourselves and allocate resources, and what would our community priorities be?"

The program is the second in the Web series, "Public Health Survival: Leadership in a Falling Market."

In the webcast, Gene Matthews, JD, senior fellow at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health's North Carolina Institute for Public Health, interviews Gary Cox, JD, director of the Tulsa City-County Health Department, about the exercise. Cox describes four initiatives that resulted from it, and Stephanie Bailey, MD, CDC's chief of public health practice, will comment on the implications of such projects during hard economic times.

Ed Baker, MD, research professor of health policy and management and director of the North Carolina Institute for Public Health, will moderate.

Following the interview, Cox and Matthews will be available for a 90-minute live online discussion forum to respond to participants' comments and questions.

While the primary audience is public health leaders, policymakers, managers, supervisors, agency planners and community leaders, the webcast is relevant for anyone concerned about public health or interested in a new business model for priority planning during tough economic times.

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For further details and to register, visit www.publichealthgrandrounds.unc.edu.
Note: For more information, contact Gene Matthews at (919) 966-9924 or matthewsphlaw@aol.com.

UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: Ramona DuBose, director of communications, (919) 966-7467 or ramona_dubose@unc.edu.

Last updated March 27, 2009

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