Marshall Kreuter on "Health is not the benefit"

I think first of all one of the important principles, let’s say philosophic points of view about public health and program intervention is that health itself is an instrumental value that gets you to something else that is more important, to an ultimate value. Most people don’t walk around their communities thinking about how healthy I am. They think about working, they think about things like their families—ultimate values. And I think the extent to which public health can link what it does with those ultimate values is the extent to which they can develop partnerships and actually get things done. For example, we have to realize every school program is beset with requests from cancer advocates, from asthma advocates, from every topical area to say “please do this in your school to improve the health of children. Well that’s a good point of view, but the role of the school principal for example is to make sure that kids in the 6th grade get to the 7th grade get to the 8th grade and so forth. So that when you frame the health issue, it ought to be in the sense of the benefit and the value added that it gives to the purpose and progress of education. So I think in that regard when you think about why we do health it for a larger and more important reason, and in that regard then you can see about how we work in the worksite, how we work with people in a clinical setting for preventative activities, particularly around health education and health behavior, so models I think should be aware that there’s a larger thing to do besides health. And then when you get to the health issue you can make that connection and people are going to be more willing to make that connection and say yes that’s an investment worth making.