• Health Protection
• Leadership
• Organizational
• In Briefs

Health Protection Goals Transform CDC

Over the last year, CDC centers, institute, and offices worked collaboratively and with CDC’s partners to develop the full vision of CDC’s four Health Protection Goals to promote and protect health in every stage of life, in every place, for emerging health threats, and around the world.

CDC’s goals guide our work and have resulted in many new proposals that incorporate collaborative and holistic approaches to addressing health protection.

An example of the projects coming specifically from the goal objectives and coordinated across CDC centers is a one-year Healthy Parenting Fellowship supported by the Healthy Children Goal. This fellowship will bring a visiting scientist to CDC to help increase the agency’s knowledge base on the role healthy parenting plays in improving health from birth through adolescence and will focus on the middle childhood population (ages 4–11 years). This enhanced knowledge will, in turn, enable CDC to develop more efective parent-targeted programs and initiatives.

The development of other goals and objectives are resulting in similar cross-cutting recommendations to unite CDC internally and externally with its partners to improve health impact. A Green Healthcare proposal backed by the Healthy Healthcare Goal proposes the investigation of how a hospital’s design, function, and indoor environment affect patient recovery and outcomes and healthcare worker safety, health, and productivity. The project involves wide collaboration that brings together multiple centers and offices at CDC as well as other government partners, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, as well as private partner, Kaiser Permanente.

Developing the home-focused messages draws from the current work in CDC programs, such as lead poisoning; injury; indoor air, including secondhand smoke; food safety; nutrition and physical activity; emergency preparedness; pest control; and infectious disease. This project also coordinates with other federal agencies and professional and nongovernmental organizations.

CDC’s four overarching health protection goals and the goal plans continue to transform the way CDC does the business of health protection by ensuring that our work is even more targeted and result/outcome oriented; our approach, action, and method are strategic and evidence based; that our course of action is specific and advances underlying strategies; and that we can measure our progress and promote accountability for the work we do.