Diversity, Inclusion, & Equity are Bedrock Principles in Public Health

Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity are Bedrock Principles in Public Health David Holtgrave Dean, UAlbany School of Public Health

Social injustice, sadly, is found in so many domains of public health. For instance, HIV most heavily and disproportionately impacts African American and Latinx communities, unstably housed persons, the Southern United States, and particularly young gay men of color. Further, life expectancy varies widely even across very short geographic distances: when living in Baltimore City, the life expectancy near my house was almost twenty years longer than the life expectancy at my office at Johns Hopkins University - and that was a distance of only five miles in the same city! In public health, we must not only improve the health of populations, but also work tirelessly to ensure that communities have equity in access to health care and in the actual achievement of health outcomes.

Further, we in public health hold as a core principle the ideals of parity, inclusion, and representation. When I worked at CDC, I had the privilege of helping to establish HIV prevention community planning. These planning groups across the U.S. were meant to bring together persons living with or at risk of acquiring HIV, community leaders, front-line service providers, scientists, and health department officials. Central to their planning efforts were ensuring that all disproportionately impacted parties were included, the persons at the table were strong representatives of their communities, and that all voices had parity in the discussions. The first step in any public health effort is not proclamation… it is listening.

Therefore, at the University at Albany School of Public Health, we are thrilled that the University’s strategic plan “Authoring our Success” holds up diversity and inclusion as a core pillar. In our School’s alignment planning, we warmly embraced this pillar, and developed a number of strategies to ensure that diversity, inclusion, and equity are reflected in our research, teaching, service, and policy activities. This means, in part, conducting research that not only measures levels of disease, but also aims to understand which communities are most disproportionately impacted. We must also continue to identify health disparities; we are obligated to develop and evaluate interventions that specifically address these disparities and build equity. The School is committed to even further expanding the diversity of our student body, staff, and faculty, and warrantying that all of our School’s events show our commitment to diversity broadly defined. Additionally, we feel an obligation to hearing community voices to guide our efforts, and placing the principles of parity, inclusion, and representation at the core of our work.

The School of Public Health is incredibly excited to play a collaborative role at the University at Albany to making real the promise of the Diversity and Inclusion pillar in our strategic plan. It is only in this way that we can successfully advance our mission to promote health and health equity in Albany, New York State, and across the world.