The Department of Health has made a sizeable grant to the School to provide training, technical assistance, and information system support to strengthen skills of practicing public health professionals, prepare our students for more effective community-based public health practice, and link us all through modern informatics and partnerships based on a sense of common purpose and complementary activities. This joint program builds upon our Summer Institute for Public Health Practice and will greatly strengthen our Northwest Center for Public Health Practice. Meanwhile, the School - together with the School of Medicine - has established a Center on Costs and Outcomes Research that will address costs and outcomes of public health interventions and medical care.
The productive partnerships among the School, the Department of Health, and several county health departments led the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to approach us to create a National Program Office for a combined initiative of the WK. Kellogg Foundation and RWJF The foundations want to stimulate proactive change among state and local health departments during this time of dramatic transformation in medical care arrangements and moves toward risk-based environmental protection. Bobbie Berkowitz, deputy secretary of health and a key architect of the Public Health Improvement Plan, will join the School as deputy director of the National Program Office (page 47). The process that generated our Public Health Improvement Plan is the model of what the two foundations want to encourage nationally.
As has been our practice for many years, Washington Public Health is a joint venture of the School and the Department of Health; articles are authored by School faculty and public health colleagues throughout the state. The 1995 issue highlighted health care reform, the PHIP, and related health services themes, and presented a special section celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of our School. At the State of the School address in February 1996, we were thrilled to have Professor Marvin Oliver, creator of the Soul Catcher logo in 1981, join us. He inspired us again with his assertion that the School has given additional meaning to the Soul Catcher through our aims and our deeds (page 46).
This issue of Washington Public Health emphasizes several high-profile
arenas of public health science and practice, with sections on emerging
and resurging infections and on natural and manmade environmental hazards.
This issue also features an interview with Alonzo Plough as he completes
his first year as director of the Seattle-King County Department of Health.
We hope that you find the magazine useful in your work and stimulating
across the broad fields of public health.
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Bruce Miyahara, Secretary Washington State Department of Health
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