Trust for America's Health Statement on the White House Prevention and Public Health Champions of Change

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following is a statement from Jeffrey Levi, Ph.D., executive director of Trust for America's Health (TFAH) on the White House Champions of Change, highlighting prevention and public health leaders.

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"TFAH is pleased to join the White House in honoring today's Champions of Change.  These leaders are taking innovative approaches to improve the health of people in their communities – and showing real results.  Prevention is one of the most common-sense ways we can save lives and reduce healthcare costs, and the efforts of these champions show how to put prevention to work in effective ways.

The Prevention and Public Health Fund, Community Transformation Grants and other federal, state and local programs have sparked a new generation of prevention efforts, building on evidence-based models in ways that work best in their local communities.

For instance, in Akron, Ohio, Janine Janosky at the Austen BioInnovation Institute, helped launch the first-of-its-kind Accountable Care Community (ACC), a unique partnership of more than 70 community organizations, including public health, medicine, education, safety-net health services, researchers, healthcare providers, the faith and service community and many others. It is already showing strong results in managing diabetes and reducing healthcare costs – which improves the health of the workforce and economic vitality of the whole city. 

In fact, in its first 18 months, the ACC, which received a Community Transformation Grant, completed two projects with individuals who have type 2 diabetes. The first, a comprehensive program that connected individuals to community resources tailored to their needs, reduced medical costs by 10 percent per month while the second project, a diabetes self-management program, resulted in estimated program savings of $3,185 per person per year.

All of the prevention and public health local heroes have had dramatic success in their communities.  Efforts ranging from easing health disparities to increasing physical activity and healthy eating to expanding the number of people accessing preventive screenings to reducing healthcare acquired infections all show how prevention can help benefit communities across the country.

Today's champions demonstrate promise that prevention holds and the payoff the country could see if we doubled down on our investment and brought these types of programs to scale."

Trust for America's Health is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to saving lives by protecting the health of every community and working to make disease prevention a national priority. For more information, visit www.healthyamericans.org.

SOURCE Trust for America's Health