Community Campus Partnership

Today, I was at a meeting with participants from a community health center and academic institutions to make a partnership and improve the health status of an urban area. I was actually very impressed with the range of the services the community health center branches were providing. They were doing community outreach with several outdoor services and collaborating with other academic and community institutions at different levels. I expressed my enthusiasm for being part of such a wonderful team and added that I am surprised how, with all these assets, we are still unable to have significant impacts on people's lives in terms of helping them not only to improve their health status but also to stand up on their own feet. I then remember the famous statement of Institute of Medicine (IOM) that public health system is in the state of disarray.

I believe it's time now to think about health problems in a broader sense of systematically sharing different information with different agencies, and designing a system for effective followup and outreach unless we make sure that any individuals receive their needed services and they are ready for being healthy, happy, and productive citizens.