Public Health Intersection

OMG it always amazes me how comfortable we become with the lexicons of our various professions. Lexicons are the vocabularies of languages and in this case I’m talking about vocabularies that are specific to a particular profession and while not always including abbreviations like the one starting this article are often useful to those in a particular profession to facilitate communication, they however can also be impediments to communication or at least cause confusion for those outside of that profession.

A case in point came in a recent e-mail from a colleague who noted that they had spoken at a NWA conference.

Now I was initially a bit confused as I thought that I had heard that NWA had merged with Delta, NWA being, of course, Northwest Airlines.

The conference my colleague spoke at was actually the National WIC Association conference. NWA also stands for the National Wrestling Alliance and the National Weather Association among others.

And what about WIC?

Most of us in public health would agree it stands for the Women, Infants and Children’s nutrition program, although it could also be the Women’s International Center, Women in Consulting, the Web Intelligence Consortium or the Windows Imaging Component or the WAN Interface Card.

And what about our friends in technology, does WAN only stand for Wide Area Network or could it be the World Association of Newspapers or World Architecture News or World Animal Net. I think you get the point.

I once worked with a state senator who stopped every presentation when the speaker used an acronym and made them describe what the acronym stood for.

People soon tailored their presentations to his committee to exclude acronyms, abbreviations, professional slang and the like.

It is important to pay attention to our audience and give them every opportunity to understand what we are trying to convey rather than trying to get by in shorthand.

It is also important to stop people when we don’t know what their acronyms or other jargon mean. How else will we learn and understand what they are saying.

We owe it to ourselves and those we interact with to say what we mean as completely and directly as we can, as communication should be about including not excluding.

Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation, I think you know what I mean.

How much of your time is spent putting out fires one at a time?

How many remember the old public health parable about whether your time and efforts were best spent downstream pulling people out of the river or going upstream to see how they ended up in the river in the first place.

When I was a trade association lobbyist representing literally thousands of public health workers, I had an open door, phone, e-mail policy encouraging all of them to feel free to contact me directly at anytime.

I still have the same policy here at PHFE.

When someone would bring ....

Most of the organizations I’m familiar with believe that they operate on framework based on, “What we all believe”.
What’s interesting is that every time I’ve asked more than one person about what we all believe, I get different answers.
While they’re not necessarily conflicting, they’re not necessarily the same either.
Often what we all believe is also described as corporate culture.
Who establishes and maintains corporate culture?
Who keeps the scrolls upon which is written, what we all believe.
Sometimes you see what we all believe displayed on p ....

In the introduction to my blog I reference taking, “The Big Step Back”, which, while it means something to me, may leave you in the dark.

One of my favorite areas of study in college was anthropology, particularly the concept of the participant observer.

Which to me meant letting people know you were there watching and taking part but not necessarily becoming a lifetime member of the tribe.

This approach has served me well during my career of working with government but never in it.

Speaking of government, when are our legislators, governors, congress people ....

The more things change, the more they stay the same

We’ve just come through our initial tangle with novel influenza, (remember swine flu, Spanish flu)

We’ve seen recent terrorist attacks, (remember the Maine, the Cole, 9/11)

We’ve seen that natural disasters can still change the face and structure of society, (too many tsunamis, tornados, hurricanes and earthquakes to remember)

We’ve seen the national efforts at health insurance reform go through a continuing saga of twists and turns, (remember Medicaid, Medicare, and other less successful legislative efforts ....

There is an app for almost everything these days.

I’m constantly amazed with the number and variety of apps available for all sorts of devices.

I recently added an app that reads my e-mails to me when I’m mobile and sends an automatic response to the sender letting them know I’m mobile and can’t respond immediately., (just in case any PHFE HR or California law enforcement officials are reading this).

It got me thinking about what a public health app would have to be designed to do.

It would have to;

• Monitor health status at the community, ....