Putting New Paradigms into Practice: Transatlantic Lessons in Population Health Improvement

Policy paradigms are frameworks that guide social analysis, deliberation, and action. They are critical in efforts to recombine intellectual, political, and organizational resources into new courses of action for public and private actors. In recent years, new paradigms have emerged to address the broad question, "Why are some people and places healthier than others?" The new paradigms include the following features: 1) they recognize a broader range of social determinants of health and well-being and, in particular, focus on "upstream causes" and solutions aimed at changing systems in addition to individual behaviors; 2) they highlight the impact of health disparities on overall levels of population health; and 3) they imply or assert that responsibility for population health improvement rests not only with governmental health agencies and providers of personal health services but also with individuals and organizations across many sectors of society.

The proposed conference would convene scholars and practitioners (elected officials, civil servants, and other leaders) to identify cross-national lessons from recent efforts in North America and Europe to develop new, multi-sector strategies for population health improvement. The conference would include sessions to actively engage participants in the following issues:

• What is population health and how can we improve it?
• What are early lessons from new actions to improve population health?
• What are the key challenges to developing effective and sustainable strategies for population health improvement?