November 1, 2018

The Drexel Urban Health Collaborative is proud to announce that there will be a special invited speaker panel session at the 2018 APHA Annual Meeting and Expo in San Diego, CA with UHC involvement. The session titled “The Power of Cities to Ensure Health Equity” was organized and will be moderated by Amy Carroll-Scott, PhD, MPH, co-lead of the UHC Policy and Community Engagement Core and assistant professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health, and will include five presentations exploring intersectional approaches to promoting health equity at the city level in the United States. Two of the presentations on the panel are also from the UHC and Dornsife School of Public Health: Jennifer Kolker, MPH, co-lead of the Policy and Community Engagement Core and associate dean for public health practice at DSPH, will present “Tracking Policy Action Related to Social Determinants of Health at the City Level” from the UHC urban policy and program surveillance project. The policy and program surveillance project is an ongoing project to identify and track city-level policies, programs, and budget initiatives in the US that support improvements in the social determinants of health. A second presentation, “US Mayors’ and Health Commissioners’ Opinions about Health Disparities in their Cities” will share results from a survey of mayors and health commissioners. This work will be presented by Rosie Mae Henson, MPH, UHC doctoral fellow, and represents research that Henson conducted with Jonathan Purtle, DrPH, MSc, assistant professor at Dornsife School of Public Health and UHC affiliate, Amy Carroll-Scott, Jennifer Kolker, Rennie Joshi, MPH, UHC doctoral fellow, and Ana Diez Rouz, MD, PhD, MPH, UHC Director and Dean of the Dornsife School of Public Health.

The APHA session will highlight important research and practice initiatives to demonstrate current initiatives to address inequities at the city-level in select US cities. With nearly two-thirds of the US population living in cities and urban areas continuing to grow, cities have an important role to play in improving population health and health equity. Cities are often home to pervasive social and health inequities, largely created by generations of systemic racial/ethnic and socioeconomic segregation and disinvestment. However, city government and health departments have the potential to lead with successful policies and programs to address health inequity and its underlying social inequities. By sharing best practices and facilitating discussion about how select cities are facing health equity challenges and creating more inclusive, stable, and healthy communities, the organizers of this session hope that the audience will take these ideas and the lessons learned back to their own communities to improve population health.

In addition to the two presentations from the UHC, the other three presentations during this session will include 1) a case study from Denver, CO on a cross-sector approach centered on internal capacity building, partnerships with other government agencies, community, and data, 2) violence as a city health equity issue and the promise of hospital-based violence intervention programs in Oakland, CA, and 3) PolicyLink’s resources and tools for helping cities address health equity, such as the National Health Equity Atlas and the All-In Cities Initiative.

This special invited session is sponsored by APHA's Community Health Planning and Policy Development Section and will be held on Tuesday, November 13th from 3:00-4:30 pm. For those traveling to the 2018 APHA Annual Meeting, information on this session is provided here.