About California's Public Health
What is the Future of Public Health?
A bold and aspirational plan to invest in California’s public health infrastructure for the future
Our mission is to equitably protect and promote the health and well-being of Californians. In the last 14 years, across more than 200 programs and countless emergency responses, CDPH has played a pivotal role in advancing positive health outcomes for California’s diverse communities. The focus of our efforts is to protect communities, promote healthy behaviors, and prevent disease, disability and premature death.
Through the Future of Public Health initiative, we are strengthening and transforming California’s public health system and bringing a new, innovative approach to equitably advancing the health of communities throughout the state. Our vision is a public health system that goes beyond traditional boundaries and fosters partnership across all sectors to address health disparities and social determinants of health.
The Future of Public Health initiative emphasizes that everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, geography, or income level, deserves the chance to be healthy – with the aim to close the life expectancy gap by 50% and reduce disease burden by 15% within in the next decade.
Core Foundational Public Health Services
CDPH, in collaboration with various stakeholders, identified six priorities within the foundational public health services that are key to strengthening our public health infrastructure. The changes proposed across these priority areas are intended to be transformational. The investment in these public health services represents a bold plan that envisions community-wide participation to allow California to jumpstart and accelerate the journey to build a 21st century governmental public health system. These six public health services are underpinned by our foundational principle of performance management to ensure equity, efficiency and effectiveness across various programs.
Vision: Strengthen our capacity at the state and local levels through a diverse workforce reflecting the communities they serve; invest in workforce development and training to help our staff adapt to ever-changing public health demands; grow and develop our current and future employees into public health leaders.
Vision: Increase capacity to respond to emergencies of all kinds, from natural disasters to infectious disease outbreaks to biological/chemical hazards and more.
Vision: Ability to track, derive insights, and take action based on community health data.
Vision: Effectively communicate to diverse audiences with timely, science-based information
Vision: Work in collaboration with community partners and multisector collaborations to harness insights and address issues concerning public health and equity.
Vision: Scale public health from health promotion to a comprehensive population strategy that emphasizes life course approaches, resiliency, equity and prevention.
Modernizing the State’s Public Health System
Under the Future of Public Health, the CDPH mission to equitably protect the health and well-being of the people and communities in California will remain constant even as we recognize that public health challenges and threats to public safety are ever-changing. With a focus on tacking future challenges, CDPH is beginning its transformation into a continuously improving and agile organization to better serve Californians.
During the last three years, our response to the COVID-19 pandemic, disease outbreaks, extreme weather events and natural disasters has shown how public health can play a pivotal role in keeping our communities safe and healthy. We are working to enhance and rebuild our public health systems, at the state and local levels, to fight the ever-growing threats to public health, including communicable diseases, extreme weather events, our nation’s behavioral health crisis, and mis-information epidemic and many others. In the coming decades, these challenges are likely to increase in scale, scope and severity. Without a concerted and coordinated effort, many of these looming threats may slip through the cracks in a broken system. California is taking action for prevention now. The task of modernizing of the state’s public health system has been a “tomorrow problem” for many years. That tomorrow starts today for CDPH.
Join us in building a stronger, healthier California. Together, we can create a public health system that safeguards our communities, promotes well-being and prepares us for the challenges of the 21st century.