Abbreviation | APHA |
---|---|
Formation | 1872 |
Founder | Dr. Stephen Smith |
Founded at | New York City |
Purpose | Improve the health of the public and achieve equity in health status |
Headquarters | Washington, D.C. |
Location |
|
Membership | 50,000 |
Executive director | Georges C. Benjamin, MD, FACP, FACEP (E) |
Staff | 60 |
Website | www |
The American Public Health Association (APHA) is a Washington, D.C.-based professional membership and advocacy organization for public health professionals in the United States. APHA is the largest professional organization of public health professionals in the United States and host the largest gathering of public health professionals in the world at their annual meeting and exhibition.[ citation needed ] The organization focusses on a wide range of public health issues with programing related to academics, policy, capacity building, and advocacy. [1]
In 1872, American Public Health Association was founded by a group of physicians, including Dr. Stephen Smith and Dr. Henry Hartshorne. [2] APHA has been involved in every major significant public health program of the last 150 years. A list of major milestones can be found on their website, completed in celebration of their 150th anniversary.
APHA has more than 25,000 members worldwide. [3] The association defines itself as an organization that: "champions the health of all people and all communities. We strengthen the public health profession. We speak out for public health issues and policies backed by science. We are the only organization that combines a 150-plus year perspective, a broad-based member community and the ability to influence federal policy to improve the public's health." It defines its mission as: "Improve the health of the public and achieve equity in health status." [4]
Members are organized into sections, special interest groups, affiliates, forums, and caucuses. Sections are the primary organizing units in APHA composed of individuals with shared interest in topics, practice areas, or conditions. Affiliates are state-based public health associations which are separate legal entities from APHA but collaborate closely with each having a representative on APHA's Governing Council. Forums are cross-organization bodies around an interdisciplinary health topic. Special interest groups are groups organizing around a shared interest with the goal of becoming a section. Caucuses are outside professional organizations that are organized around social issues or populations in official relation with APHA. [5]
APHA is governed by a Governing Council composed of voting representatives from the various APHA member sections and independent state affiliates. The Governing Council receives reports from staff and member committees, adopts the official policy stances of the association, and elects a 24 member executive board to oversee the operations of the association. Members also serve in elected and appointed roles across the APHA member sections, committees, and several subordinate boards related to advocacy, education, science, publications, and other areas where collaboration is key. [5]
APHA has five types of membership: regular, retired, early-career professional, organizational, and student. [6] Members receive an online subscription to the American Journal of Public Health and The Nation's Health as well as a weekly newsletter, Inside Public Health, access to APHA's online community, and an extensive members only webinar series. [7]
The accomplishments of public health leaders are recognized through an awards program. APHA presents its national awards during its annual meeting. National APHA awards include: [8]
Many APHA member sections also present awards in their particular field or focus area.
The Public Health Education and Health Promotion section recognizes individuals in six award categories. The awards include the Distinguished Career Award, Early Career Award, Mayhew Derryberry Award for contributions of behavioral scientists to health education, Mohan Sing Award for humor in health education, Sarah Mazelis Award for health education practitioners, and Rogers Award for public health communication.[ citation needed ]
The Statistics section offers the Mortimer Spiegelman Award to a statistician under the age of 40 for contribution to public health statistics. [10]
Rema Lapouse Award – sponsored by the Mental Health, Epidemiology, and Statistics Sections, this award is granted to an outstanding scientist in the area of psychiatric epidemiology.[ citation needed ]
The American Public Health Association publishes more than 70 public health books. Several of these are the reference source for their specialty within public health practice. Some publication titles include:
In addition, APHA publishes the American Journal of Public Health , a monthly peer-reviewed public health journal covering public health and policy. APHA also publishes The Nation's Health , a monthly newspaper covering public health news and APHA updates. [14]
The APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition is the largest meeting of public health professionals in the world. The meeting draws more than 13,000 attendees, offers 700 booths of exhibits and features more than 1,000 scientific sessions, representing the full spectrum of public health issues as well as the multifaceted nature of APHA in relation to the advancement of science and public health advocacy. Presentations cover new research and trends in public health science and practice. [15]
National Public Health Week is an observance organized annually by APHA during the first full week of April. [16] The week’s activities are designed to raise awareness around issues that are important to improving the public’s health. [16]
In June 2019, The American Public Health Association firmly condemned official litigation with the United States of America by the Trump administration. At the end of the Trump administration, the APHA opposed a legal filing with the Supreme Court which would have repealed the Affordable Care Act. [17] This Supreme Court case was decided in June 2021, and the court left the Affordable Care Act in place. [18]
The Mortimer Spiegelman Award, established by the APHA in 1970, honors a statistician under age 40 who has made outstanding contributions to health statistics, especially public health statistics. [19]
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated mission of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the betterment of all humanity. AAAS was the first permanent organization established to promote science and engineering nationally and to represent the interests of American researchers from across all scientific fields. It is the world's largest general scientific society, with over 120,000 members, and is the publisher of the well-known scientific journal Science.
The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second-oldest continuously operating professional society in the U.S. behind the Massachusetts Medical Society, founded in 1781). ASA services statisticians, quantitative scientists, and users of statistics across many academic areas and applications. The association publishes a variety of journals and sponsors several international conferences every year.
American Water Works Association (AWWA) is an international non-profit, scientific and educational association founded to improve water quality and supply. Established in 1881, it is a lobbying organization representing a membership of around 50,000 members worldwide.
Health advocacy or health activism encompasses direct service to the individual or family as well as activities that promote health and access to health care in communities and the larger public. Advocates support and promote the rights of the patient in the health care arena, help build capacity to improve community health and enhance health policy initiatives focused on available, safe and quality care. Health advocates are best suited to address the challenge of patient-centered care in our complex healthcare system. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) defines patient-centered care as: Health care that establishes a partnership among practitioners, patients, and their families to ensure that decisions respect patients’ wants, needs, and preferences and that patients have the education and support they need to make decisions and participate in their own care. Patient-centered care is also one of the overreaching goals of health advocacy, in addition to safer medical systems, and greater patient involvement in healthcare delivery and design.
Patient advocacy is a process in health care concerned with advocacy for patients, survivors, and caregivers. The patient advocate may be an individual or an organization, concerned with healthcare standards or with one specific group of disorders. The terms patient advocate and patient advocacy can refer both to individual advocates providing services that organizations also provide, and to organizations whose functions extend to individual patients. Some patient advocates are independent and some work for the organizations that are directly responsible for the patient's care.
Abel Wolman was an American engineer, educator and pioneer of modern sanitary engineering. His professional career left impacts in academia, sanitary engineering research, environmental and public health services, engineering professional societies, and journal publications. Wolman is best known for his research with Linn Enslow in the chlorination of Baltimore's municipal water supply, which has contributed to the distribution of safe municipal water supplies globally.
Helene D. Gayle is an American physician, and academic and non-profit administrator. She has served as the president of Spelman College since 2023. She formerly served as CEO of the Chicago Community Trust, one of the nation's leading community foundations. Earlier in her career she was the director of international humanitarian organization CARE, and worked in the field of public health programs at the CDC.
Michael Abbott Newton is a Canadian statistician. He is a Professor in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and he received the COPSS Presidents' Award in 2004. He has written many research papers about the statistical analysis of cancer biology, including linkage analysis and signal identification.
Xihong Lin is a Chinese–American statistician known for her contributions to mixed models, nonparametric and semiparametric regression, and statistical genetics and genomics. As of 2015, she is the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Coordinating Director of the Program in Quantitative Genomics.
Nilanjan Chatterjee is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biostatistics and Genetic Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, with appointments in the Department of Biostatistics in the Bloomberg School of Public Health and in the Department of Oncology in the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He was formerly the chief of the Biostatistics Branch of the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics.
Rafael Irizarry is a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of biostatistics and computational biology at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. Irizarry is known as one of the founders of the Bioconductor project.
Francesca Dominici is a Harvard Professor who develops methodology in causal inference and data science and led research projects that combine big data with health policy and climate change. She is a professor of biostatistics, co-director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and a former senior associate dean for research in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Amy Helen Herring is an American biostatistician interested in longitudinal data and reproductive health. Formerly the Carol Remmer Angle Distinguished Professor of Children's Environmental Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she is now Sara & Charles Ayres Distinguished Professor in the Department of Statistical Science, Global Health Institute, and Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics of Duke University.
Liming Peng is a Chinese biostatistician who works as a professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, where she is also affiliated with the Winship Cancer Institute. The topics of her statistical research include survival analysis, quantile regression, and nonparametric statistics; she applies these methods to the study of chronic diseases including diabetes and cystic fibrosis.
Mortimer Spiegelman was an American statistician, actuary, and demographer whose research focused on the application of statistics to the field of public health. He was Staff Statistician at the American Public Health Association (APHA) from 1967 until his death in 1969. He was a fellow of the APHA, the Society of Actuaries, and the American Statistical Association. The APHA's Statistics Section has awarded the Mortimer Spiegelman Award in his honor since 1970. The annual award is given to a distinguished public health statistician under the age of 40.
Roger D. Peng is an author and professor of Statistics and Data Science at the University of Texas at Austin. Peng originally received a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics from Yale University in 1999, before going on to study at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he completed a Master of Science in Statistics in 2001 and a PhD in Statistics in 2003. The focus of his research has been on environmental health, specifically focusing on air pollution and climate change in his research. Peng is also a software engineer who has authored numerous R packages focused on applying statistical methods necessary for a variety of topics. He has also created numerous resources including books, online courses, podcasts, blogs, and other articles to aid those learning data analysis.
Sherri Rose is an American biostatistician. She is an associate professor of health care policy at Stanford University, and once worked at Harvard University. A fellow of the American Statistical Association, she has served as co-editor of Biostatistics since 2019 and Chair of the American Statistical Association’s Biometrics Section. Her research focuses on statistical machine learning for health care policy.
Helen C. Chase was an American public health statistician.
Regina L. Loewenstein was an American public health statistician who worked as a lecturer in the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
Joel C. Kleinman was an American health statistician and epidemiologist specializing on the causes of infant mortality. He was director of analysis at the National Center for Health Statistics.