The City’s Office of Public Health has been putting health first in Phoenix since its establishment in 2022. Our mission is to promote the health and well-being of all by employing innovative, rigorous, and evidence-based approaches to public health practice. Our primary role is to provide guidance and expertise around public health for City of Phoenix departments and the Phoenix community.
At the Office of Public Health, we are guided by 5 key principles:
- Community Safety & Wellbeing for Everyone, Everywhere
- Engaging Those Most in Need Where They Are
- Data Driven & Evidence-Based Practice
- Community Empowerment & Involvement
- Center Health Equity & Human Rights
When people think about healthcare, they often think about medicine, but achieving a healthy and well community is about so much more than treating health conditions. It also involves creating and fostering an environment that promotes and protects the health of all individuals. Public health is not just about extending life but expanding our quality of life so people can live healthier and happier lives.
While public health encompasses medical care in the traditional sense, including preventative services like cancer screenings, treatment of traumatic injuries, and the management of chronic conditions, it also includes fields like public safety, parks and recreation, infrastructure, government and other policy-making entities, epidemiology, research, housing, water and sanitation, agriculture and food production, emergency preparedness, and many, many more. In fact, the odds are you interact with something public- health related multiple times every day!
Public health is a multidisciplinary science that aims to improve the well-being and health of entire populations. We approach improving the health of communities on three levels: primary, secondary, and tertiary.
It is important that we address all levels to achieve the greatest impact on health status for everyone. As you can see, improving public health is not just a matter of treating a condition, but preventing it from occurring as well as managing health over time. It is an ongoing and iterative process that depends on creating and maintaining environments and social structures that allow health to prosper.
At the City of Phoenix Office of Public Health, we acknowledge that the health status of individuals and the broader community is profoundly impacted by the Social Determinants of Health which are all of the external, non-medical factors that affect health and well-being. The Social Determinants encompass the social, economic, geographic, political, and systemic conditions that people are born into and live within, shaping their quality of life, level of risk, and health outcomes. Decades of research show that the Social Determinants of Health can be as critical, or even more so, than access to healthcare and lifestyle choices when it comes to health status.
The Office of Public Health seeks to address the Social Determinants of Health while promoting health equity and resiliency.
A state of health equity exists when everyone, no matter who they are or where they are from, has an equal and just opportunity to achieve their highest level of health. At the Office of Public Health, we are committed to promoting health equity in all the work that we do. This involves applying a health equity lens at all stages of planning, development, and implementation as well as tackling the systems and structures that perpetuate the health inequities in the first place.
Vitalyst Health Foundation's Elements of a Healthy Community wheel illustrates the important connections between health equity and the social determinants of health.
