Big plan for a healthier people

The Dept. of Health and Human Service's 1,200+ page "Healthy People 2010" should help inch public health forward in the public's attention.

Editorial. April 17, 2000.

A quick measure of the challenge of improving the public's health can be taken by glancing at Dept. of Health and Human Service's "Healthy People 2010" -- not at the contents but at the size of the document itself. The "Conference Edition" is 1,244 pages long.

Once inside this public health master plan for the coming decade, there are 467 objectives. Even when those are collapsed into "focused areas," that list has 28 items. It can all seem a bit overwhelming.

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Yet the project's overarching goals are succinct and signal a reassuring clarity of vision. The first goal is to "increase quality and years of healthy life." The second is to "eliminate health disparities" among different segments of the population. Even that long list of 467 objectives, designed to serve those goals, provides a tight focus for improvement in each area of concern.

This current version of the plan -- earlier ones targeted the decades of the 1980s and 1990s -- also contains a notable new addition designed to bring greater awareness and understanding to public health issues. It is a list of 10 leading health indicators by which improvement or slippage can be tracked in areas such as obesity and tobacco use. With luck, it should help inch public health a little closer to the economy in terms of capturing the public's attention.

"Healthy People 2010" is largely intended for the public health community and various types of institutions. But individual physicians who want to take an activist role -- or simply want to take stock of where we as a nation are -- may want to take a look. There's plenty to see.