In his testimony for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America, David Fleming, former director and health officer of Public Health in Seattle and King County, Washington, discusses the need to move beyond just our health care and public health systems to engage other natural partners in improving community health.
Underpinning the poor national health indicators of the United States is a more nuanced problem of profoundly local place-based health disparities. Only by directly confronting and correcting these disparities can we hope to see improvement in our overall national health and the indicators that measure it. The solution hinges on investment to improve the community-based policies, systems, and environments responsible for producing poor health.