Public Health Is America's Football Team
Now that Election Day is behind us and a new group of governors, Senators, Representatives, and local officials are in place, I have been thinking a little bit (ok, a lot) about what would happen if I could talk to each of them for 15 minutes. If I had the attention of a newly elected governor who will be selecting someone to be the next state Secretary of Health or a newly elected Senator who will be going to Washington DC and will have the power to vote for increases in CDC’s budget — what would I say to them? What would I talk about? How would I grab their attention and make what is important to me important to them?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
And after much thinking, I have come to the conclusion that I would talk about football.
Yes. FOOTBALL.
Football is a uniquely American game where two teams of 11 (one on offense and one on defense) work their way up and down a 120-yard field trying to get a pigskin ball across a goalline in order to score a touchdown.1 And regardless of which team you root for (I was born in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, supposedly I bleed black and gold), we all know that a good football team has to have a solid/standout quarterback. The quarterback is responsible for calling the plays, moving the ball, and getting points on the scoreboard. The other players (21 between the offense and defense) are a blurry mix of receivers, runners, and blockers. Yes, they have fancy position names, but at the end of the day unless you are the quarterback, who has his hands on the ball during every offensive play, the rest of the team just blocks, runs, or catches.
Teams need a good quarterback. Without a good quarterback, teams lose.
BUT the rest of the team does the punishing, necessary, and often unrecognized work to ensure that their team is successful.
And so it is with public health and medicine.
Our healthcare providers — doctors, nurses, therapists, PAs — are the quarterbacks of our health football team. They run the plays that make us healthy as individuals — they prescribe medicines, perform surgeries, help us develop healthy habits and quit unhealthy ones, monitor our health status, and read the results from test results. They help us make individual health plans and respond to our questions about unusual infections and irregular cancer screening results.
We NEED good healthcare providers. We rely on them. They diagnose us, medicate us, care for us, and ensure that we have the care we need to stay alive. Healthcare providers are the quarterback of our healthcare system.
HOWEVER, there are 21 other players on a football field who help run, carry, steal (what my daughter calls an interception), block, and move the ball up and down that football field. The quarterback calls the individual plays and sets up the team to win, but those 21 other players are doing the punishing, necessary, and often unrecognized work to create healthy communities.
Public health is the other players on our health (football) team.
Public health has mad respect and appreciation for our healthcare quarterbacks — our medical providers — BUT public health is (metaphorically) protecting the quarterback, leading a defense that the quarterback does not participate in, and then running, carrying, stealing, and catching the ball.
Public health professionals and the health departments/agencies we work for are responsible for —
Preventing the spread of communicable (aka infectious diseases)
Ensuring that all communities have safe food, water, and air
Supporting maternal and child health
Improving access to clinical service (so that everyone has access to a healthcare provider/quarterback)
Preventing chronic diseases and injuries
To do this work, public health professionals have been trained in epidemiology, statistics, environmental health, behavioral health, assessment and surveillance, community partnership development, health equity, organizational competencies, policy development, emergency preparedness and response, and communications.
Public health professionals are necessary, but they are also very different from healthcare providers. Just as a quarterback is very different from the rest of the players on a football team.
Public health works behind the scenes so that you, your family, and your community can lead healthy, happy, and productive lives.
Public health (metaphorically) blocks infectious agents from entering our food and water supplies through the creation of policies and regulations. We also are responsible for the creation of sanitation systems and surveillance systems to monitor community health through sewage. Public health (metaphorically) creates paths down the field to ensure that car crashes do not happen by requiring seatbelts and car-seats/boosters and enforcing speed limits. We educate and communicate. We assess population health through data collection, analysis, distribution, and action. We work tirelessly to create healthy communities for all.
And while the quarterback gets a lot of time in the limelight and in front of the media, public health knows from the start that (as Dr. Bill Foege says) —
“No one will thank you (a public health professional) for the disease they didn’t get.”
Public health is a collaborative team of hard-working individuals, who are passionate about and committed to creating healthy communities for all. We focus on prevention and know that no one will thank us for a disease they didn’t get.
This is why I would want to talk with newly elected governors, Senators, Representatives, and local officials about football.
I want to bring attention to the work of public health and the unique training of public health officials. I want our elected officials to recognize that if we are only paying for a quarterback or supporting the quarterback, our health system will fail. The entire health team — the quarterback and the 21 other players who block, run, catch, steal, and sometimes kick the ball — need to be fully funded and supported.
As they say… there is no “I” in TEAM (together everyone achieves more).
We are healthy because, for each quarterback that is out there, an entire team of public health professionals is backing him up and creating the environments, policies, educational programs, programs, assessments/evaluations, surveillance systems, and more to ensure that the team is gameday ready. To ensure that we have healthy environments, health policies, access to care, preventive medicine, screening programs, and more.
Public health is the team supporting your health, the health of your family, and the health of your community.
Newly elected officials who are tasked with appointing Commissioners or Secretaries of Health — should look to the public health community for individuals who have been trained to create healthy communities through individual and community-wide efforts to lead our public health departments.
Public health is America’s (metaphorical) football team.
It is time we recognize and fully support what public health does to ensure we all win. That we all have healthy communities and the services, information, and guidance needed to lead long, healthy, and productive lives.
Public health needs to be your team.
Recognize the work we do, support us, encourage us, and advocate for us to serve in leadership positions across the country at local, state, and national levels. We can no longer rely on the quarterbacks of our healthcare system — just the physicians — to serve in the 21 other positions on the team. The quarterback is the quarterback.
End of story.
Public health is here to lead and support the development of healthy communities. We are your health team. We are running, carrying, blocking, catching, and working tirelessly to ensure that everyone has access to care, and can live, work, play, and pray in safe and healthy communities.
just want to point out that to many of us this sentence reads like a foreign language. What is a touchdown? why not call it a goal? why is a kick called a field goal when the ball goes through the uprights? This game is a mystery to me. In an effort to help my 9th-grade daughter through PE class, we recently learned the rules of football and we laughed at the ridiculousness of it all and cheered when she passed her football test (yes, a football test — we spent our valuable time studying for a football exam).