Healthy Alaskans 2020 is a program developed by the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services. As part of its goal to make Alaska healthier, the program released a report Wednesday outlining the strengths and weaknesses in Alaska’s public health infrastructure.
Healthy Alaskans 2020 is intended to improve health and ensure health equity for Alaskans. DHSS teamed up with the Alaska Native Tribal health Consortium to create a list of 25 health priorities for Alaska.
As part of the Healthy Alaskans 2020, a report was released called “Alaska’s Community Capacity Review: A Statewide Public Health System Assessment.” A group of 79 residents representing various organizations from all over Alaska met in May to conduct the assessment.
Community health promotion and improvement manager with DHSS Jayne Andreen says the report looked at every aspect in health care.
“And so what this assessment is it takes a look at how we operate and how we function as this collective system.”
The report stated there were some areas that Alaska needed to improve on: expanding current work in social issues such as alcohol and substance abuse, strengthen public health systems through increased performance management and increase the professional expertise in small communities.
Andreen says the state wants to work on its partnership with health care providers to ensure the residents of Alaska are getting the care they need.
“We recognize that Alaska has some really good health data and we need to do a better job at helping people find that data and use that data and there’s a lot of efforts that are happening with Healthy Alaskans in order to make that happen. We recognize that we need to really focus our energy on not just addressing the health issues that come to our attention, like obesity and cancer rates, but we also need to be looking at the root causes and really focusing on addressing those underlying elements that contribute to the health.”
However, it’s not all bad news. The report says Alaska rates are above average in the nation in research and innovation, above the national average in the enforcement and regulation of public health laws and strong partnerships between tribal health, public and private organizations.
Andreen says the health system in Alaska has several programs to be proud of.
“We actually do have some strong research entities in the state through the university system and through the tribal health system. And we also receive a fair amount of federal assistance to conduct that research.”
The report also includes opportunities to implement Health Alaskans 2020 by identifying gaps in the system and providing guidance to policymakers.