ECU professor co-chaired task force that set state’s health goals for 2030
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services has released a report detailing health goals for North Carolinians by the year 2030.
The report, “Healthy North Carolina 2030: A Path Toward Health,” marks goals for each decade using social determinants of health. The project is in conjunction with the North Carolina Institute of Medicine and is based on social and economic contexts such as age, gender, physical environment, education and other drivers of health — also known as social determinants of health.
The 2030 report included input from a task force co-chaired by Dr. Ronny Bell, professor and chair of the Department of Public Health in the Brody School of Medicine.
“By serving in this capacity, I was able to bring the voice of eastern North Carolina to the table,” Bell said. “and to say, ‘Let’s remember, we have this large, rural, diverse population that’s greatly impacted by the social determinants of health.’”
Dr. Ronny Bell, professor and chair of ECU’s Department of Public Health, chaired a task force for a new report on health goals for North Carolina. (Photo by Rhett Butler)
Other task force chairs included Jack Cecil, president of Biltmore Farms, LLC; Dr. Laura Gerald, president of the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust; and Dr. Elizabeth Tilson, state health director and chief medical officer for the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services. They were joined by 44 other task force and steering committee members, as well as four work groups with a total of 107 members.
“Over a year’s time, we came together and met on a quarterly basis to look at the specific indicators that we wanted to consider for the report,” Bell said.
The report is designed to guide state efforts to improve health and well-being through partnerships among the Department of Health and Human Services, the Division of Public Health, local health departments and other partners across the state to work together toward shared goals.
Overall, the 2030 report details 21 health indicators across the topics of social and economic factors, physical environment, health behaviors, clinical care and health outcomes.
“We’ve come to the realization that in order to optimize health, we need to start looking more upstream,” Bell said. “It’s important to tell people to eat healthy, to exercise and not to smoke, but we need to know why people engage in those behaviors. A lot of times, that’s driven by where you live, how much money you have, whether or not you’re employed and how much education you have.
“We felt that it was important — to the extent that we have data — to look at that data and see how we can bring this to the state’s attention and how we can move things toward better determinants.”
According to the report, some of the goals for 2030 are to decrease the number of people living in poverty, to increase economic security, to dismantle structural racism, to improve child well-being and to improve third-grade reading proficiency. Other goals include topics ranging from decreasing alcohol and tobacco use to addressing obesity and lack of insurance and housing. The goals touch on a wide variety of social determinants that impact a person’s overall health and quality of life.
The goals will be assessed periodically, most after five years, to measure progress toward meeting health benchmarks.
Bell said the experience chairing the task force allowed him to get a perspective not only in eastern North Carolina but how differences and similarities bridge rural areas in the region and in the mountains of western North Carolina. That view highlighted the challenges and needs for citizens across the state but also underscored the importance of ECU’s role in meeting the 2030 goals.
“We’re uniquely positioned because of where we are,” Bell said, “because of the mission of ECU and the mission of [the Division of] Health Sciences. We’re uniquely positioned to have a school of public health and to bring awareness to these issues.”
He said the missions of the division’s colleges and schools could gather strength to address the state’s health challenges.
“I would say it’s not just public health, it’s all of us,” he said. “Look at some of the work that the dental school is doing, and nursing or allied health, or the work that Brody is doing. They’re really trying to address some of these health gaps. It’s just that collectively, we need to start thinking about why we are seeing some of these persistent disparities—like diabetes and heart disease and stroke—in this area. It’s largely driven by some of these factors that public health can play a role in trying to address.”
-by Spaine Stephens, University Communications