Date: Monday, December 23, 2024
We are Sara Wolicki, MPH, Allison Gately, MPH, and Angie Deokar, MPH. We work for the Division of Injury Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC), U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Change is the only constant. Science changes. Professionally, change requires us to adapt, learn, grow. This is true at all levels of government and true for funders as well as recipients of funding. We are Angie Deokar, Allison Gately, and Sara Wolicki, three Evaluators at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Along with a multidisciplinary team, we evaluate the impact of a capacity-focused program administered through the CDC National Center for Injury Prevention and Control called the Core State Injury Prevention Program (Core SIPP).
Core SIPP is a cooperative agreement that embraces the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Public Health 3.0 approach. Public Health 3.0 positions public health professionals as “Chief Health Strategists” within their communities. To do this, Public Health 3.0 highlights the importance of developing multi-sectoral partnerships, establishing and maintaining actionable data systems, and providing innovative funding models that support public health infrastructure and leverage funding streams.
Aligning with the Public Health 3.0 approach, Core SIPP supports 26 state health departments build and maintain their public health infrastructure to address injury prevention. The three main strategies of Core SIPP are to build and maintain robust surveillance systems, strengthen collaborations and partnerships, and perform continuous quality improvement and evaluation. Building and maintaining infrastructure/capacity is foundational to effectively practicing public health. However, it is challenging to connect infrastructure/capacity building to reductions in injuries and improved health and wellbeing within our communities. As a multidisciplinary team, we take a “puzzle piece” approach to our evaluation of the Core SIPP program, collecting and synthesizing mixed-methods data from Core SIPP recipients to better understand the impact of infrastructure/capacity-focused funding.
As we start assembling the puzzle, we are finding that Core SIPP’s focus on infrastructure/capacity, rather than traditional public health interventions, leads to public health actions, both directly and indirectly. Although we have more to learn, we are beginning to uncover a more comprehensive picture of this program’s impact—a narrative that no single piece could convey on its own.
Check out “Public Health 3.0: A Call to Action for Public Health to Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century.” As evaluators working in a government setting, it is essential we keep up with the changes in our field, including our approach to supporting others via funding. Furthermore, we must share our evaluations of these innovative approaches; contributing applied practice-based evidence back into the field.
As authors, we want to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of the state health department recipients of the Core State Injury Prevention Program (CDC-RFA-CE21-2101). This evaluation would not be possible without their efforts to provide the data that we analyze. Thank you for all you do to support injury prevention in your communities.
Thank you also to our colleagues on the CDC Core SIPP Support Team. For more information about CDC National Center of Injury Prevention and Control’s Core State Injury Prevention Program visit Core SIPP or contact coresipp2021@cdc.gov.
The findings and conclusions in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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