Implementing Community-Campus Partnerships in South Carolina: Collaborative Efforts to Improve Public Health

Abstract

Collaboration between schools of public health and communities is essential to creating healthier communities. Community-Campus Partnerships for Health has established a policy agenda that recognizes the importance of supporting the connection of community engagement with the traditional components of the mission of academic institutions: teaching, research, and service. 1 "Communities" have been defined by Green, Daniel, and Novick as not only localities but also "groups that have a common interest or cause even if they do not share a common location." 2 In this sense, community partners may represent volunteers, agencies, or organizations in the public or private sectors. 2 This view of communities as important collaborators in efforts to improve the public health also is evident in the 2003 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, The Future of the Public's Health in the 21st Century. 3 The report emphasizes the "intersectorial" nature of the public health system, noting that the governmental public health infrastructure is the "backbone of the public health system" and is complemented by other public health system sectors including the health care delivery system and academic public health. 3 The report calls attention to the importance of communities, the business sector, and the media as potential public health system actors and acknowledges that "individuals, communities, and varied social institutions can form powerful collaborative efforts to improve health that government cannot replicate." 3 Collaboration with communities defined by locality as well as communities defined by common interest is

Perspectives on a Community-Based Course for Public Health Students

“…Such partnerships involve "a close mutual cooperation between parties having common interests, responsibilities, privileges and power" (Campus-Community Partnerships for Health, 2006) and can build trust between communities and universities to codefine strategies needed for improving overall community health. These partnerships have been beneficial to the schools' students and faculty as well as to community centers at the local and state levels (Richter, Gimarc, Preston, & Williams, 2003).…”

Assessing the Status of Partnerships Between Academic Institutions and Public Health Agencies

“…Although these collaborative activities are wide-ranging (emergency preparedness, 3,4 disease prevention and control, [5][6][7][8] reducing health disparities, 9 hospices, 10 minority health, 11 minority workforce recruitment, 12,13 rural health, 14,15 maternal and child health, 16 environmental health, 17,18 education, research, and service, [19][20][21][22][23] and so on), they do not provide a holistic or systems view of academic institution-public health agency (academic-agency) partnerships. Most assessments of these relationships have been conducted by public health academic institutions and primarily reflect the faculties' own reports of success, [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] as do recent assessments involving schools of nursing [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44] and medicine. [45][46][47] Third-party evaluation is rare, and little is known of what the leaders of health agencies think about the value of these partnerships to the...…”