Dr. John R. Finnegan

It means us working with businesses, us working with faith communities, us working in...

and so you know health departments are a good example we we are going to always have some level of leadership there and and some level of staff support but um i think that uh we really need to think outside of the box i mean we've depended a lot on on federal and that's good i you know that when it was there now it's not there what are you going to do yeah

Yeah, and I'll pass the baton here to Clarence because this community aspect, I think, is incredibly important.

You said something that I think is really important, and that is the way people self-identify.

I know a lot of people in the health professions for whom what they do is not just a job, it's a vocation, if you will, as we used to call it.

And I think in many ways, they're the ones that are really suffering most under this because, well, for a variety of reasons.

But I also think the challenge with public health end of things is that the public health's mandate in this country has always been political.

from the get-go.

You can go back to the 19th century and there were fights over what public health could actually do in communities and there were laws passed and all this kind of stuff in those days.

And so, you know, I think it's important to remember that, that we can't avoid dealing with the politics.

And, you know, politics, I think, writ large.

But I think the challenge in working politically

with, you know, in helping to get ourselves out of the current situation is really that building those relationships, you know, we call them cross sector.

And I mean, by that, that you're not just working with people in the health area, you're working with people

in the business area because god knows they want healthy people working for them right and they can't they don't want to see the the collapse of public health or things of that kind so i think that's what i'm saying is that we got to be more local about this you could say in a way all public health is local all medicine is local in some respect but um

You know, whatever happens in the smallest town in Wyoming, sooner or later is going to affect the small towns in Minnesota, if we're talking about communicable diseases.

So that's the kind of dynamic I would love to see the public health community and the medical community and all health professions start to think creatively of how are we going to provide the absolute best

care that we can for populations, communities, and individuals?

And what do we need to do that we haven't been doing up to this point to make that happen?

Well, I think you've got to have a leadership structure.