 Volume 13: Issue 4 March 1999 |
 Healthy People 2010: What Next? The official comment period for Healthy People 2010 objectives closed in December, but the work is far from over. More than 3,000 people from the United States and several foreign countries submitted some 10,000 comments on the 700-page draft of Healthy People objectives for 2010. Comments arrived by courier, mail, fax, and e-mail as well as through personal testimony during the public hearings. And now, work-groups are reviewing the comments to assess how best to integrate the information into the focus areas. The Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, coordinator of the Healthy People initiative, is analyzing what improvements if any could be made to the overall 2010 framework itself. Comments on Healthy People 2010 objectives ranged from short e-mail messages to documents of 75 pages or more. The 3,000+ people who submitted comments included lay people as well as health providers, health officials, academics, and representatives of advocacy groups. Kidney patients and nephrologists, firefighters, school health nurses, and advocates on behalf of people with sleep disorders all mounted letter-writing campaigns. Comments arrived from every state in the U.S., as well as from the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and eight foreign countries, including New Zealand, Pakistan, and the Republic of Korea. Six public hearings—held in Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, Seattle, Sacramento, and Washington, D.C.—attracted more than 2,000 people. To take advantage of modern technology and electronic communications, the draft objectives for 2010 were posted on the World Wide Web, enabling people to comment over the Internet and read what other people said. Of the comments received, approximately 20 percent were submitted directly over the Web. All public comments are now searchable and available to use in planning, designing, and implementing local health improvement efforts. Comments can be searched in various ways, including by
If you submitted a comment during the public comment period and want to confirm that it was posted, check the Web site at www. health.gov/healthypeople. If your comment has not been posted, e-mail the webmaster (see instructions under the section "Contact the Staff"). As Prevention Report goes to press, the Healthy People workgroups are retooling objectives based on public comments. Those comments deal with all aspects of the objectives and the text, including, but not limited to:
To contact the work-group coordinators, go to the Web site and check out the section titled "Contact the Staff." Please note that more than one contact is listed for some workgroups, in which case it is best to contact all. The results of the work-groups’ revisions will be presented at the April 23 meeting of the Secretary’s Council on National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for 2010 in Washington, D.C. [This meeting, while open to the public, has limited seating and requires advance notice of attendance; if you wish to attend, call Phyllis Carroll at (202) 205-8611 or e-mail pcarroll@osophs. dhhs.gov] Meanwhile, work on the launch has already begun. Save this Date: January 25-28, 2000! That’s the date for the Partnerships for Health in the New Millennium conference, which will be a joint meeting of the Healthy People Consortium and the Partnerships for Networked Consumer Health Information. The conference will be held in Washington, D.C., and will highlight the release of the Nation’s third generation of disease prevention and health promotion objectives. For information, contact the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Room 738G, 200 Independence Avenue, SW., Washington, D.C. 20201, call 1-800-367-4725, or visit the Web site on the front page. What Can YOU
Do Right Now? |