ORLANDO, FL –  Four public health doctors from across the nation have been honored at a national conference for their work in establishing and maintaining academically based teaching health departments. Orange County Health Department Director and American Association of Public Health Physicians (AAPHP) President Kevin M. Sherin awarded the doctors with Presidential Certificates for Lifetime Meritorious Service in San Diego at the American Public Health Association’s Annual Meeting and Exposition.

    Dr. Carl Brumback of the Palm Beach County Health Department was honored for creating the first community health center in Florida and establishing a preventative medicine residency in a county health department. Dr. Jean Malecki, Director of the Palm Beach County Health Department, was also recognized for efforts to establish Palm Beach County Health Department as an academically based teaching department. Dr. William Keck, Professor and chair Emeritus of the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, was recognized for creating a longstanding academic health department in conjunction with the university while he served as the Director of Health for the City of Akron. Dr. Leonard Morse of the Worcester City Health Department in Massachusetts was honored for establishing the Worcester City Health Department as a rotation for University of Massachusetts medical students, graduate student nurses, preventative and family medicine residents, a ten week summer internship for college students, and an elective rotation for senior medical students.

    The vision of the AAPHP is to create a network of teaching health departments and across the country to improve health information by applying effective public health principles, and the development of data-driven population based services. It has been demonstrated that greater coordination and synergy between local health departments, colleges of public health and medicine, and other community partners can result in the development of “academic health departments” – whose core components represent service, teaching and research. As defined in a recent Institute of Medicine report, a public health physician is one “whose training, practice and world view are based in large part on a population focus rather than individual practice; that is, on assuring the availability of essential public health services to a population using skills such as leadership, management and education as well as clinical interventions.”

    The mission of the AAPHP is to promote the public’s health, and educate the nation on the role and importance of the public health physician’s knowledge and skills in practicing population based medicine and fostering communications, education, and scholarship in public health. The association played a major role in advocating for the tobacco settlement in1998. The association represents physicians from all specialties who work in public health, and who have a passion and care about protecting the health of all Americans.

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