Leading Improvement Through Inquiry: Practice-Based Research Networks in Public Health

Mays GP  •  November 2, 2011

Abstract: The field of public health has surged in public visibility and attention in recent years due to its potential to mitigate leading risks to human health and wellbeing. Advances in prevention research provide an expanding toolbox of programs, policies, and interventions to reduce health risks. As these advances occur, uncertainties loom large regarding how best to deliver efficacious public health strategies to the populations at greatest risk. The nation's local, state, and federal public health agencies—together with their peers and partners in the private and public sectors—represent a vast yet diffuse delivery system of actors charged, to greater or lesser degrees, with implementing these strategies. Unfortunately, evidence about the most effective and efficient ways of organizing, financing, and deploying public health strategies across this delivery system is extremely limited. Public health practice-based research networks (PBRN) provide unique and valuable mechanisms for generating this evidence.

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