It’s time to ‘turn a public health moment into a public health movement’
Brown
University
“Here
we are: Open tent. Socially distanced. Many of you wearing masks,” Jha
said.
Multiple
effective vaccines against COVID-19 are freely available, yet people are taking
health and safety precautions because, he said, the world is still fighting a
pandemic that has exposed “weaknesses in our national public health system and
the inability of that system to meet the urgent challenges of our time.”
Speaking
to a Brown public health community of faculty, staff and newly arrived
undergraduate and graduate students on Wednesday, Sept. 1, on the University’s
Simmons Quad, Jha referred to the pandemic as a lens through which the school
and the country as a whole could view lessons learned — and a focal point for
charting a path for what needs to happen next.
“As
a school, we have important and urgent opportunities to confront what COVID has
exposed,” Jha said. “Because throughout history, pandemics have opened a window
for action that wasn’t open before. How we choose to act is up to us.”
Jha
detailed how COVID-19 has exposed challenges to community health across the
world: systemic racial inequities that resulted in a disproportionate rate of
COVID-19 deaths among people of color; failure of public health systems to
effectively collect data, perform tests, trace contacts and vaccinate
populations; deadly and widespread effects of science denial; and the dangerous
efficiency of social media to amplify and disseminate misinformation, with
real-world negative health consequences.
“We are now at a point — today, in 2021 — where if we wanted, we could prevent nearly every death in the world from COVID,” Jha said. “We have the tools, but not the will. That’s the moment we’re in.”
The
dean noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that the most critical
insights into public health issues often come from teams of people willing to
work across academic and professional boundaries. For example, he said,
building, testing, producing and deploying billions of vaccines in a short time
period required unprecedented collaboration among scientists, private industry
and government leaders.
“So
maybe the most salient lesson of this pandemic is also the most obvious: That
at the end of the day, the hardest and most important problems are solved when
people from different backgrounds, different disciplines and different lived
experiences come together and work together,” Jha said. This is what makes
Brown University special, he said. “Our structure, our size and, most
importantly, our culture actually nurtures and rewards multi-disciplinary
collaborations.”
Commitment to
education, equity and opportunity
Jha,
who became dean of the School of Public Health in September 2020, detailed the
ways in which SPH students, faculty and staff are working to address pressing
public health challenges. He also shared new plans for the future. As part an
effort to expand the reach of the school’s education and training to ultimately
improve global public health, Jha said that SPH would launch an online master
of public health program in Fall 2022.
“This
program will give people around the world access to our school, access to our
faculty, and to their knowledge and wisdom,” Jha said. “It is a commitment to
education, of course, but it is also a commitment to equity. To expanding
opportunity.”
As
another example of the school’s work to expand diversity among public health professionals,
Jha cited the Health Equity
Scholars program. Launched in the 2020-21 academic year and about to
welcome its first full cohort of 12 scholars, the goal is to prepare MPH
students from historically Black colleges and universities to address health
disparities and become transformative leaders in public health research and
careers.
“If
you want to address systemic racism as a public health problem, you’ve got to
change the face of public health leadership in America,” Jha said. “These
scholars represent that change. They are a structural intervention into the
heart of America’s public health systems.”
Jha
noted that expanding representation among scholars from historically
underrepresented groups extends to SPH faculty and students, too, as part of
the University’s overall Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan. Over the past 12
months, the school grew its ranks of tenure-track faculty from underrepresented
groups by 60%, and applications to SPH programs from prospective students of
color increased by 150%.
“If
we are going to solve the big public health problems of our time, it’s very
clear we need a diverse team of scholars, teachers and practitioners,” he said.
“Of course we have more work to do, but this is progress… Increasingly, we are
the becoming the place where people from all walks of life can join us, invest
in their public health education and become part of the movement to make health
better.”
Among
other plans for the coming year, Jha said that SPH will launch a pandemic
preparedness center; train public health leaders to combat misinformation;
bring in faculty to lead work on the intersection of climate and health; make
the school a leader in integrating data into key public health decisions;
further strengthen the Hassenfeld Institute for Child Health Innovation with
the goal of eliminating disparities in health outcomes for children in Rhode
Island; and work more intentionally to become a global public health school by
launching new programs, recruiting new faculty and building ties with
institutions like the World Health Organization and the Africa Centres for
Disease Control and Prevention.
Transforming
the field will not be easy, Jha said.
“The
rules of public health have changed over the past 18 months,” he said. “But if
we meet the challenges of this moment, I am 110% confident we are going to find
ourselves in a better place… There is no place better prepared to meet this
moment than Brown. To prepare for the public health crises we face, and those
to come, by preparing our students and by preparing ourselves. This is a
moment. But this is our movement.”