voices
Healthy People 2020
JEREMY McCARTHY is the director
of global spa development operations
at Starwood Hotels and Resorts. Follow
his blog, psychologyofwellbeing.com to
read more about health and spa.
E
BREWING UP IDEAS?
TAKING A STAND?
START THE
CONVERSATION.
Pulse would love to hear from
you. Send in your Voices
contribution
to [email protected].
26 PULSE
■
May 2012
very 10 years, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services takes a
collaborative approach to aligning health institutions from across the country
on massive health goals. The initiative is called “Healthy People.” Every
decade, they invite people from a broad variety of health institutions to collaborate on identifying the mos t important health goals for the U.S. and to
set measurable targets that we—the government, business industries and the public—
can work towards to make improvements.
The goals of the Healthy People initiative are to encourage collaboration across different sectors in health care, to provide greater health awareness that can impact individual
behavior, and to identify national health improvement priorities with measurable goals
and objectives so progress can be tracked.
I love what Healthy People stands for as it is a rare example of what our government should do: Bring people together to work towards common goals and facilitate
a sense of community that has citizens working together to improve the quality of
life for everyone.
In recent decade, the Healthy People priorities focused on increasing the length and
quality of human lives by reducing rates of preventable diseases, disability, injury or
other causes of premature death. They also aimed to diminish the disparity in health
across a variety of demographic categories including race and income status.
They recently announced the progress report from the Healthy People 2010 goals
(established in the year 2000) and it seems that progress has been made on the first
goal, but not on the second. In less than 10 years, the average life expectancy in the