Author
ACHI Staff
The COVID-19 pandemic has focused attention on public health like nothing else in recent memory, ACHI President and CEO Dr. Joe Thompson writes in his latest column for the Healthcare Journal of Arkansas.
In the years leading up to the pandemic, however, public health in the U.S. was generally undervalued and underfunded, which contributed to the nation being ill-prepared for COVID-19, Thompson states. He lists four lessons from the pandemic and discusses how learning those lessons can help us better prepare for the next public health emergency.
For more on this topic, see ACHI Health Policy Director Craig Wilson’s guest column for the Arkansas-Democrat Gazette, “Pandemic Lesson: Risks to Underfunding Public Health,” and ACHI Policy Analyst Elizabeth Montgomery’s blog post, “State, Local Public Health Funding Declined Before Pandemic.”
