New Guide: How to Promote Better Health for All

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HealthEquityGuide_Page_01Low-income communities, particularly communities of color, are more likely to lack access to healthy foods, smoke-free air, and safe places to play and be active.

But these health inequalities are preventable.

A new tool, A Practitioner’s Guide for Advancing Health Equity, can help public health practitioners work at the community level to tackle health inequities through policy, systems, and environmental improvements designed to enhance tobacco-free living, healthy eating, and active living among the underserved.

The guide, from the Prevention Institute and the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, has practical tips on how you can build change for health equity:

  • Tips to help you and your colleagues build organizational capacity; develop partnerships; foster meaningful engagement; and design and evaluate equity-oriented strategies.
  • Strategies, based in evidence and honed by practice, that are designed to reduce health disparities and create healthy communities for all.
  • Information about potential barriers and unintended consequences that can hinder chronic disease prevention efforts.
  • Examples of successful equity-oriented approaches to improving public health and reducing disparities, drawn from communities across the country.

The guide also has dozens of examples of successful changes in health equity.

For example, in Louisville, Ken., Louisville Metro Public Health and Wellness implemented the Healthy Hometown Restaurant Initiative, designed to encourage restaurants to provide healthier options for their patrons. Outreach efforts led many restaurant owners throughout the city, including in low-income neighborhoods, to alter their menus and provide nutrition labeling information for their menus.

Download the new guide.

By The Numbers By The Numbers

20.7

percent

of Latino kids have obesity (compared to 11.7% of white kids)

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