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The requisite capacities and capabilities of the public health practitioner of the future are being driven by multiple forces of change, including public health agency accreditation, climate change, health in all policies, social media and informatics, demographic transitions, globalized travel, and the repercussions of the Affordable Care Act.
We describe five critical capacities and capabilities that public health practitioners can build on to successfully prepare for and respond to these forces of change: systems thinking and systems methods, communication capacities, an entrepreneurial orientation, transformational ethics, and policy analysis and response.
Equipping the public health practitioner with the requisite capabilities and capacities will require new content and methods for those in public health academia, as well as a recommitment to lifelong learning on the part of the practitioner, within an increasingly uncertain and polarized political environment. (Am J Public Health. 2017;107: 1227-1232. doi:10.2105/AJPH. 2017.303823)
In the April 2016 issue of AJPH, DeSalvo et al. proposed a "Public Health 3.0" upgrade to "boldly expand the scope and reach of public health" as a means of addressing social determinants of health, the high cost of health in the United States and the country's relatively low ranking in terms oflife expectancy, and persistent gaps in health status.1 The necessary components of this upgrade would include enhanced leadership (with local public health agency directors being the "lead health strategists" in their communities); new partners (elected leaders, businesses, people from subpopulations at the greatest risk for poor health); accreditation (of governmental health agencies); technology, tools, and data; new metrics of success; and an adequate and reliable funding stream. In his Shattuck Lecture in 2015, Frieden described a future of public health that involved closer working relationships with clinical medicine, particularly regarding the prevention, control, and treatment of infectious and chronic diseases.2
In a recent editorial3 and review4 on macro trends affecting public health practice, we identified several "forces of change" that are exerting an impact on current governmental public health practice: the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), public health agency accreditation, climate change, health in all policies, social media and informatics, demographic transitions, and globalized travel. We also described possible approaches to measuring, tracking, and understanding the effects of these forces of change on public health practice,...