Stan and Clarence chat with three incredible leaders in public health and policy: Dr. Tom Kottke, Dr. Amy Lansky, and Dr. Alison Cuellar.Dr. Tom Kottke is the Medical Director for Well-Being at HealthPartners and a Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota. With a career dedicated to cardiovascular health and preventive medicine, Dr. Kottke brings a wealth of experience in evidence-based practice and public health leadership. A member of the inaugural U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, he has contributed to federal guidelines on tobacco treatment and co-chaired the National Quality Forum’s Cardiovascular Standing Committee. Dr. Kottke earned his medical degree from the University of Minnesota and his Master of Science in Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Board-certified in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease, Dr. Kottke's work exemplifies his passion for creating healthier communities.Dr. Amy Lansky serves as the Director of the Community Guide Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where she leads efforts to deliver evidence-based public health solutions. Over her extensive career, Dr. Lansky has driven innovation in HIV prevention, surveillance, and policy, including serving as Director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy. She holds a PhD and MPH from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Swarthmore College. With over 80 peer-reviewed publications, Dr. Lansky is a recognized leader in advancing public health through strategic partnerships and data-driven interventions.Dr. Alison Cuellar is a Professor of Health Administration and Policy at George Mason University and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research spans behavioral health, criminal justice, Medicaid policy, and health system innovations, with a focus on equitable care and evidence-based improvements. Dr. Cuellar has contributed to the National Academies' efforts to promote health equity and transformation in youth care systems. With a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a track record of impactful policy research, Dr. Cuellar brings critical insights to community and system-level health initiatives.Join us as Dr. Kottke, Dr. Lansky, and Dr. Cuellar share their insights, professional journeys, and visions for advancing public health through evidence-based strategies and policy innovation. All related information can be found here.Join the conversation at healthchatterpodcast.comBrought to you in support of Hue-MAN, who is Creating Healthy Communities through Innovative Partnerships.More about their work can be found at huemanpartnership.org.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to Health Chatter. And today's show, we are going to be talking with some wonderful, wonderful guests today. And it's about the Community Preventative Services Guide and the task force that put that whole thing together. It's going to be quite interesting. So stay tuned. I will get to everybody in just a second. Welcome back to our listening audience.
We've had Health Chatters had a little bit of a break over the weekend. Thanksgiving holiday, but we have lots of shows coming up. We have shows booked through the end of March. So stay tuned for that. We have a great crew that makes our Health Chatter podcast successful.
Maddie Levine-Wolf, Aaron Collins, Deandra Howard, Matthew Campbell, Sheridan Nygaard, and of course, Barry Baines is our medical advisor. All these people do background research for us. They do the production. They do the marketing. and transcribing. They take care of our website. And Clarence and I, what do we do? We just chat and about health. And it's been a really pleasure.
We'll soon be closing in on the start of our third year with Health Chatter. So thank you all to you, the listening audience. So today's show again is on Community Preventative Services Guide. We've got great people with us. Tom Cockey is really a special colleague. I was talking to Tom right before the show. We figured out we probably have known each other for around 40 years.
He's a great colleague. He is one of a few in the arena. that really bridges the gap between public health and medicine and the medical side of things and has done it on a variety of different topics and community initiatives over the years. I can't begin to describe the great work that he has done and
the insights that he has provided in both of those arenas and is still committed to it this day. He's going to be retiring tomorrow. But if I know Tom, he's going to be linked with this subject for quite a while. So thank you, Tom. You're a special person, special colleague. And I'll let you introduce your colleagues. from out east.
Thank you. First, Dr. Amy Lansky. Amy serves as the director of the Community Guide Program. On your browser, that's thecommunityguide.org. You can sign on and follow as you follow the podcast. The program is at the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the Office of Science, Amy's responsibilities include supporting the Community Preventive Services Task Force.
And Dr. Alison Quayar, Alison Evans Quayar is a professor and associate dean of research in the College of Public Health at George Mason University. She's a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She currently chairs the Community Preventive Services Task Force. Back to you, Stan.
Thanks. By the way, I forgot to mention to our listening audience, we have a great sponsor for our shows, Human Partnership, and they're a great community health organization. And without them, we couldn't be able to do these shows. So thank you to Human Partnership. You can check them out at humanpartnership.org and check us out at healthchatterpodcast.com. All right.
So let's get the show going here. Community Preventative Services Network. task force and the guide. So let's first start with what is this? What is this guide? And first of all, is this the first iteration? I can answer that question. But for our listening audience, is this the first iteration? What makes it useful? Who uses it? These types of questions. Let's start with that.
So maybe Amy, do you want to take that? Start with that?
Sure, I can start off and then I'm sure Allison and Tom can chime in. So the Community Preventive Services Task Force was started in 1996. It was stood up by the Department of Health and Human Services. And the charge to the task force was to review population health interventions and identify what works for public health.
And this was set up and the oversight for the task force, the support was charged to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And so CDC has been supporting the task force continuously since that time task force members come on and off the task force. And the community guide is currently the website.
It's the product that is a compilation of all the task force recommendations and findings regarding a variety of population health interventions. And currently the community guide is comprised of around 250 recommended interventions across 20 public health topics. Alison, you want to add to that?
Yeah, Alison, go ahead. Sure. I mean, I can tell you a little bit about the task force and how we arrive at recommendations. So the task force is a group of 15 public health and prevention experts. We have a variety of expertise and backgrounds working in health departments or universities or in health coalitions.
So the members of the task force have backgrounds as nurses, physicians, social workers, epidemiologists, health economists, and similar. The role of the task force then is with the support of the community guide program staff to review the evidence and provide recommendations and findings on programs and services and interventions that are at the population health level.
So that means they're broadly targeted. The audience is communities, schools, public health departments, employers, the military, pharmacies, integrated healthcare, faith-based organizations, and related groups. So it's more expansive than your preventive service in a doctor's office. You might have your cholesterol checked. That is frequently a one-on-one, as we call it, visit with a clinician.
And what we're talking about here with the Community Preventive Services Task Force are typically services that are delivered one-to-many, right? In... a group population health kind of context. If you don't mind, I would like to add that the structure of the CPSTF is an important part of that structure are the liaison organizations. There are 32 of them.
They're organizations and federal agencies, a wide range. So Indian Health Service, Department of Veterans Affairs, Armed Forces, NIH, the Association, the... Back up.
The American Public Health Association, National Governors Association, National Association of County and City Health Officials, representatives from pediatrics, physician assistants, school health programs, state health departments. I haven't even covered them all, but they're 32 in all. And they're an incredibly important part of our work. They help promote the guide, its findings.
They help select and prioritize which interventions we're gonna look at next. And they also serve as experts on our coordination teams. When we get ready to do a systematic review, they're an important part of the expert input that we then receive. And ultimately, they help translate our recommendations into practice. So that's basically the structure of the operation.
So, Tom, you've been involved with this for a long time. I think you, weren't you, if I read right, you were involved with the very first guide that came out. So put it all in perspective. No, is that true? No, okay. But I'm sure you've had input into it. So tell me, put it in perspective a little bit. How have, you know, as a practitioner, how have you used the guide?
Yeah, thanks for asking, Stan. I'm gonna talk about parks and trails, greenways with additional support. Okay, so we in St. Paul, I live in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the mayor proposed a little pittance of a sales tax to improve our parks and trails. And so I was able to write a letter to the editor
and say and write that the rigorous evidence shows that parks and trails with additional support increase physical activity. And we all know that physical activity prevents multiple diseases, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, et cetera, et cetera, obesity. And so that let me do that. The other example I'm going to give is community health workers. I'm working with a group from Rondo.
Rondo is a historically Black neighborhood that was transected by the interstate, and we're trying to reestablish it. But the evidence is clear that community health workers improve control of blood pressure, cholesterol, et cetera, et cetera.
And also community health workers are an entry-level position in healthcare for somebody who thinks they might be interested in adopting some sort of healthcare profession. And it doesn't cost the hundreds of thousands of dollars in tens of years of becoming a physician. So there are two examples that are just very clear and based in the community.
So, you know, one thing that came to my mind when I read through all the information was, all right, how does this guide complement healthy people and the objectives for the nation? So in other words, and by the way, one of our own here in Minnesota, Nico Prank was on the show a while back and talked to because he was co-chairing Healthy People and the development of that.
And so, okay, so now we have healthy people, we have a community guide. So how do they compliment one another? Anybody can maybe tackle that one?
I can certainly take a stab at it and then turn to Amy and Tom. It's a great question. And obviously there are just an enormous number of interventions that we could be looking at. And we go through a prioritization process. We seek input from the community from the nation, right, through the Federal Register. We say, we want your input. We go through our liaisons. We do extensive outreach.
And we're guided by Healthy People, the latest iteration of information in Healthy People, both on what are the important topics What are the populations that are impacted? What might be the reach of a given kind of intervention? And so we place ourselves within the healthy people information, I would say. Amy, did you want to add to that?
Yeah, thanks, Alison. I will also add that the relationship between the community guide and healthy people is also reflected in both of their websites. So if you go to the community guide website, you'll see the relevant Healthy People objectives listed for each intervention that the task force recommends. And likewise, if you go to the Healthy People website, healthypeople.gov,
you can look for an objective and it will give examples from the community guide of effective interventions that implement in your community to help reach those healthy people targets. And so they're very cross-connected and have been really since the implementation of the task force.
So if I jump in, you know, if we were traveling, I'd say healthy people is where we want to be. And the community guide is effective ways of getting there. So they complement each other. Study both. Yeah.
Clarence. Yeah. I'm enjoying the conversation. I want to ask a question about the word community. Okay, and the reason I wanna say that is that I know people throw that term around. So when I talk about community, I generally talk about grassroots organizations that are doing the work.
My question to you is this, is how can we effectively utilize this work in order for us to be able to be more effective in terms of our work? Because generally, and I think when community is being used For many people, it's usually from an organizational perspective, but there are a lot of people that are in community that are doing this work.
How could we utilize this information for us to be better at what we do?
Oh, I love that question. And I'm excited to say that I think the community guide can help. locus of what is the priority for your community is going to be with your community. And where the community guide can help is to say, well, let's say you want to focus on substance use and you want to focus on substance use for youth, let's say.
Then the community guide can help you understand the evidence of what's likely to work. Because if you think about the kinds of interventions we're talking about, We want to help communities save time and resources tackling the literature, right? Because these are a broad range of health challenges, obesity, mental health, smoking cessation, HIV prevention, anti-bullying, just as examples.
And those studies can be in the medical literature, the public health literature, the social sciences literature. It's vast. So the community guide is there to help go systematically through the evidence and present it to your community organizations and let them decide where they want to start, but help filter the ways in which they might start.
Another really neat feature, I think, of the community guide is the section on implementation considerations. And I think that's really rather unique, which is to say, we'll have a recommendation, and then we'll have the implementation considerations around it, such as what? Hmm. then we'll have recommendations or just information about implementation considerations.
And those aren't necessarily, they can be from the studies we looked at. They can also be from talking to experts. They can be looking at the broader literature. And it's to help you figure out what you might encounter or what we do or don't know about this intervention that might impact your community.
One more question. One more question. How do people, again, we talk about that community level like myself, how do we access this information? I think it's very, very important, but we don't know about it. How do we help to get people to know more about how to utilize this information?
Clarence, let me jump in. Well, first of all, just the communityguide.org, and then you start poking around.
It also comes in one-pagers. It comes in multiple pages. I think it's really a matter of engaging with the website.
So Allison is frozen. Stan, do you hear me? Yep, I hear you. Okay. I mean, I'm going to say that when we start on a topic, we turn up thousands of articles and it boils down. And I know being a cardiologist, like nephrology or specialists, I can't read that literature because I'm not a specialist there. And we're not just a team of physicians looking at all this. It's like Allison pointed out.
We have many, many different perspectives and expertise. And so we can trust that. And one of the things using the community guide does is saves both time and money. And so if we start off, we think we have a great idea. And we implement it, it doesn't work. We've not only wasted a lot of money, but we've wasted a lot of time. And using the community guide prevents that from happening.
Like Alison said, there's one-pagers, there's long papers, there's papers in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. However you want to use it, it will fit your needs. And you can trust that What the community guide recommends is evidence-based and well-vetted.
Barry. Thanks. Yeah, I want to try and create just a little bridge here between some things that Clarence was talking about and the information that Allison was presenting and Tom, you as well. A lot of these recommendations, to me, they're sort of like the gold standard and they have a great... you know, research base behind it, great evidence base behind it.
And oftentimes, I've always had a conundrum between, well, what's going to be, again, from the time and money piece that, you know, I think of that in terms of operationally how you do it, and then, and I How much does it cost to do that? In the recommendations and in the community guide and even back to the Community Preventive Service Task Force work, is there ever a prioritization
about sort of like, you know, the likelihood of success of operationalizing something that from a financial perspective, from a money perspective, it just could never be done. In other words, we have the answer, you know, if we could buy, you know, Vaxavans and send them around to every community knocking on every door, we can get a lot more people, you know, immunized.
But that's not going to be practical because of, workforce issues and financial issues. So I'm just trying to reflect that from a community hat perspective and even a clinician in an office. Are there some of these recommendations, do they get ranked in any way in terms of likelihood of success or ease of implementation so that you can sort of make that impact
but in a more efficient way, recognizing limitations on our time and money. I hope that makes sense.
I think your question makes a lot of sense. And I think the community guide addresses a piece of it. So for... When we do an evidence review, we follow it with an economic review.
So in the case of the costs and benefits of parks, trailways, and greenway infrastructure interventions, the community guide also found, we studied the economic costs and benefits of those interventions, and we found that the cost ratio was three to one, meaning every dollar you spent led to $3.10 worth of health benefits or benefits in total.
So we do those economic analyses of the cost benefit, the cost effectiveness of the interventions, and then we have the implementation considerations. So in the example of cognitive behavioral therapy programs in schools, you might want to think about confidentiality, the role of parents. Do you have professional mental health professionals on staff in your schools. And those are all fleshed out.
That said, we don't rank them based on those implementation considerations. We do in the prioritization talk, speak to Okay, I'm going to just back up and cut that. Just drop that thought.
Can I add on that?
Here's my question about this. So, you know, again, reading through this, some of the recommendations, it says recommended strong evidence, recommended sufficient evidence, et cetera, et cetera. Help our audience distinguish between that. What's sufficient? What's recommended? It's like, help us here. Which one should we really be digging deep into? Or which one should we forget about?
Does that make sense?
Amy, you might want to take a stab at that. Yeah, thank you. I think that when you look at the... level of evidence. So the strong level of evidence or the sufficient level of evidence. I would say that is the way the task force has examined the evidence and looked at the strength of the recommendation. But from an implementation standpoint, from a community standpoint, when they come
to the community guide and they're looking for an intervention to use in their community or their health system. If it's recommended, it's recommended and is good for use. And it's a level, the strong and sufficient are more reflective of the body of evidence that stands behind the recommendation. And that's important from a standpoint of how the task force operates.
But from a perspective of using the community guide, I think a recommendation is a recommendation and they're useful and it's a trustworthy resource for communities to use.
That's helpful. Tom, go ahead.
Yeah, I want to jump in this. So I think most people who come to the guide are passionate about something, okay? So I have my passions around community, around healthy Black pregnancies, around physical activity. And so I'm going to go in there and ask, what can I do to promote my passions for the community in this?
I don't think they approach it, the average person says, what are the strong, I'm going to do the strongest. It's what's the, how can I promote a particular thing? Like very immunizations. And so like Amy just said, the strength of evidence frequently is how much research has been done. And so either strong or sufficient, the reader can be,
assured that what was examined by the CPSTF was in fact found to be effective.
Clarence, go for it. You're on mute. So I wanna ask the question, that was excellent because that's at least the question I wanted to ask. I was looking at the substance abuse around youth. And what I saw was that it was evidence, most of the studies were conducted in urban, I mean, in rural or suburban communities.
Okay, so my question would be then, where can I find those studies that would talk more about the urban area so that I would be able to be, it would apply, it could apply to me more.
I love this, you know, but I'm thinking that if we're going to use the guide, we want to be able to, as we talked about a little bit earlier, just to kind of go to some things that might be a little bit more relevant to us. Is there a way for us to do that?
Yes, there is. So I have two answers for that. One is if it's listed as an evidence gap, what we're basically saying is there aren't studies and you can stop there. We've looked for you. Or you can look at frequently a breakdown that we do is... urban, suburban, rural, very often. And you'll see kind of the table and you can just pull out those studies.
That would be in the long version of our recommendation. In the example of cognitive behavioral therapy in schools, we were looking at 81 studies. They're all in there and summarized. If someone, an expert as yourself, wants to dig in, the information is there. On the evidence, I did also want to add that we have occasionally had insufficient evidence findings.
A recent one was on multi-tiered trauma-informed school programs, meaning you have a universal component where you're reaching all children in the school, a tier two mild symptoms, a tier three more intensive, And there, unfortunately, there was just a lack of evidence. It didn't mean that the intervention isn't effective. It meant that we don't have the body of work to help guide us.
So the studies found reduced PTSD, but they weren't a rigorous study. So occasionally there will be insufficient, and that would be one where we just can't tell you.
So Clarence, I want to jump in here about this and the value of the evidence gaps section of every finding. And so what I would do is with the program you were discussing is write a letter saying, dear my Senator, there is an evidence gap here. Please ask the NIH or the CDC about funding programs that will help me understand how I can deal with substance use disorders in urban communities.
And so there's another value there beyond the recommendation. It's the finding of evidence gaps, which is helpful for community activists. Thank you for that.
That was wonderful. We should put that in the show too. Yeah. Exactly.
Can I add one piece about that, Clarence? Because, you know, I would not want you to walk away and say, I'm an urban community. This intervention is not for me. What we're saying is what we know from the evidence was mostly conducted in suburban and rural areas, but not entirely. And if we had evidence to say, we don't think this will work in urban areas, we would say so.
So it's more a matter of this is an intervention that's shown to prevent substance use among youth, and we know more about its use in suburban and rural areas But I wouldn't want people to interpret that as meaning it's not effective or should not be used in urban areas.
One of the advantages of the community guide is that all of the background papers are cited. And so you can go through, there's nothing here about, oh, this is expert opinion or this or that. You can dive down into exactly what the publications are.
And there may be, and I'm sorry, I don't know right off the bat, but there may in fact be some papers that report interventions that were done in urban communities. But the take home is that you can track back the evidence to all of the publications on that website. There's nothing. It's totally transparent.
So I've got a couple of questions here. So actually, even implementation types of things. So on both sides of the equation. So let me give you, for instance, when I was at the Department of Health and we were applying for many of our
cardiovascular grants from the the centers for disease control we use community guides i mean it's a starting point if nothing else in for us you know at the time for us to identify objectives that we know at least have some useful background to them now so that's how we use the in order to identify things that we wanted to put in a grant application. So now I'm going to flip that.
So Amy and Allison, you're from Centers for Disease Control. How do project officers use this in order to help them make decisions about grants? And this is just one application here. How do they use it or might use it for... a decision on whether or not an application should be funded or not.
So I am over in the land of universities and I encourage my faculty to use this resource to help them get up to speed on what is known and where if they want to test new interventions with their community partners, kind of what is the jumping off point? I think Amy can speak more directly to how this is used in calls for proposals and evaluation.
Yeah, thanks, Alison. So our relationship at the Community Guide Program runs across CDC. So we always have program partners who we're working with on the systematic reviews. And the relationship with the funding announcements can come both on the front end and the back end. And so the substance use interventions we were talking about is a good example
where the Division of Overdose Prevention at CDC was interested in community interventions to offer as part of their support of the Drug-Free Communities Program. And so we've been working together to identify a series of interventions to do the reviews, to have the task force examine and make a recommendation if appropriate.
And then those would go into the portfolio of interventions that that drug free communities program can choose from. I think a second example where it's a little more on the back end is the recent funding for the prevention research centers, which are a group funded across the nation in universities doing a wide variety of prevention research.
And part of their focus in their current funding cycle is on implementation research. And so in their funding announcement, it was included a number of community guide task force recommended interventions where they could choose from that list to propose an intervention to expand the implementation science.
So it's all very tied in to be sure that what the task force is working on, that the recommendations they make are going to be used and are going to be supported whenever possible through funding announcements.
So, all right. So, you know, Tom, you alluded to kind of a, you know, this is the research that goes back a ways. First of all, how far back does it go? How far do you do, you know, research, you know, on evidence for the last 10 years, five years, two years? And then my other question is, How is it kept up to speed about new things that are coming out?
Are there appendix, you know, appendiums that are added to it as new research comes out? Or how is it that it's kept vital?
So depending on the intervention, we'll sometimes even use international studies, but it depends on the body of evidence and what the expert group that's working on that particular topic feels are sort of like conditions, settings, and interventions. And if we have 81 studies, we don't have to go back very far.
We have to watch our bandwidth and resources in terms of how frequently we can go back to any particular intervention, but this is a very dynamic space and the ways in which we're tackling some of our public health problems today are different from how we might have done it 20 years ago. So we're guided by the what is it we're studying and what seems like a comparable set of interventions.
We talked earlier. Oh, go ahead, Tom.
Yeah, we had a big discussion at the last meeting about mobile, you know, on your smartphone interventions that change, I mean, almost hour to hour. Right, right. And so, yeah, we look at it. what's been done, potential change. Are there significant updates to systematic reviews? Are there new systematic reviews, et cetera?
And sometimes, like I was looking at the community guide the other day and there was a, an announcement about a paper that was published and said, well, this has not been reviewed in a while. Well, it's been archived. And so there is a review and we'll give you a heads up if something is felt to be perhaps not totally up to date.
So here's another question. So you went through this whole process. How long did it take to do it, to create the updated guide here?
Well, we're constantly, continuously looking at different topics and they're in different stages of review. So we're prioritizing the next ones. We get a theme, cognitive behavioral therapy in schools. The program staff go and they say, well, there's kind of these two different types along with our expert group, universal and targeted therapy.
then we that's actually ends up making we're going to do two separate reviews so it it's somewhat organic so it'll depend on the complexity of the topic how quickly we can do the review
I want to come back to something Clarence said earlier, because to me, when communities are thinking about, for example, their opioid settlement funds, this is the perfect time to be going to the community guide.org and thinking about the many ways and populations for whom you could start to tackle substance use prevention at different stages.
Yeah, that's an excellent point of when there's money on the table or you're going to the legislature, what it helps focus on things that are effective versus bright and shiny objects.
So another thing that kind of came to my mind are public health things that hit us all of a sudden, you know, use COVID as an illustration. and some of the things that we have to be aware of. For instance, research around long COVID, for instance.
So how is it that the community guide work embraces things that all of a sudden hit us and we have to have some background evidence, shall I say quickly, Any thoughts on that one?
Turn that one to Amy, perhaps. Because the community guide relies on the existing evidence, much of which needs to be peer-reviewed and published, we're not the ones out at the front end suggesting new and novel things, right? We're solidly in the world of what is known, and that's our sweet spot. But Amy, do you want to describe how it might pertain? Yeah.
And so the task force definitely wants to be responsive and relevant to what's going on in the field of public health. And so one of the things, one example from COVID is we put together the task force recommended interventions that might be useful to communities that are addressing COVID.
And so this included interventions to increase vaccination, and they weren't specific to COVID vaccines, but they might be useful in that setting. We promoted a number of interventions around cancer screening because we quickly learned that people were, kind of falling off their routine preventive screenings. And so promoting ways to increase that.
And then a number of mental health interventions as well. And so we pulled together the information that we had that we thought would be useful
And what we're doing now is beginning to look at what were the actions that were implemented during COVID for which the evidence, the evaluations of those programs are starting to be published and we can come together and do the systematic reviews and the task force can deliberate and make recommendations for things that might be useful in future outbreaks or during respiratory virus season.
You know, I'd be remiss in this crazy environment that we all live in to not ask this question. How does the politics of it all, the cloud of politics affect this? How is it that... politicians embrace evidence. Do you let them know that here it is, here's like a good gold standard that we can use on over all these different topics that you put it? How is it that we get them into this?
One way we do it is our annual report to Congress.
Oh, great.
And we highlight work that we do each year. So in some years, we focused on, let's say, a rural community and sort of the theme of rural communities. One year, the thematic locus was around children's mental health. I think there's a lot of areas where we have agreement, where there's challenges that we would like to address together. And so there's definitely that communication.
It's also the guide has lots of friends, as I said, through its liaison organizations, and they too help pick up the recommendations and turn them into practice. The guide isn't telling communities what their priorities are. are or should be. It's given that a community has decided it wants to tackle a given topic. Here's some places where it can start.
We just, we want to accelerate that and help make it possible.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. All right. This is my goodness. You know, just given the idea that the community guide is, you know, touches on, frankly, many of the subjects that we have chatted about in Health Chatter. It's kind of nice to know that this type of resource is available to all the subjects It's linked to all the subjects that we're talking about here. So it's really timely.
And I'm really glad, Tom, that you recommended that we have a show on this in order to start publicizing this and the availability of this document for everyone, frankly. It'll be very, very useful. So quickly, I'll go around the horn here. Clarence, last thoughts.
You know, my last thought is this, is that because I do a lot of community events, it would be great to have a one pager to put on my table so that people can pick it up and they could utilize that information for the work that they're doing. I mean, we need this information. We need to be able to streamline the process to get people to understand where they can go for the resources. So
I will be looking for a one pager to put on my table. We'll go to these events so that people can understand how to utilize this work. And thank you so very, very much. I really, really, truly appreciated the conversation.
It's a deal, Clarence. We can definitely provide that to you.
Tom, last thoughts.
Yeah, well, thank you for having us on. I just consider myself a foot soldier in public health. And yeah, the process is totally transparent. It's where to go. It's like Clarence says, it's where to go when you want to know what works in community preventive services. Absolutely.
Amy. Amy. I want to say thank you so much for having us on and for the opportunity to talk with you about the Community Preventive Services Task Force and the Community Guide. And I will put in a plug and say for people who want to keep up to date with what the task force is recommending, there's an account through social media on X. It's at CPSTF.
You can follow the community guide through CDC's LinkedIn account. And I think most importantly, you can sign up for updates on the community guide website to receive email notifications about new recommendations and findings every time they're released. So great to keep up with what the task force is doing because it's always changing and always adding new recommendations. Thanks.
Thank you.
All right, Barry.
Here's the medical insight from it all.
Yeah, a little medical insight. This is just such the community guide in particular is such an excellent resource to have in a community and a clinician's toolbox. What I like about it is that it's pretty comprehensive. It doesn't tell you what to do because oftentimes community interests
lean in one direction or another, but I think it really points you in the right direction so that you're not totally wandering in the wilderness to try and figure out what to do. I was also glad to hear that review process because that's one of the things is that in medicine and science, we know that things oftentimes don't stay the same, they're always changing.
And, and with, you don't want to drive people crazy every two weeks by, you know, changing things around, but on a periodic and systematic way of doing it, it could be very helpful because you always want to be up. You do want to be up to date. That's for sure. So thank you all for just this really very interesting show as many of our shows are to me.
So thanks for being here and enlightening me a bit more on the community guide and, the Community Preventive Service Task Force.
So, you know, my feeling about this is, you know, in this fast-paced world that we're all involved with, it's almost like speed dialing where to get information or one-stop shopping. You know, it's just like, don't tear your hair out, click, and here you are. It's kind of like, and you know what? That's... Again, in this day and age, that's worthwhile.
Also, what I appreciate about it is confidence. You know that when you go to a guide like this, you can be confident that, you know, there's good truth behind it. There's good judgment behind it, guidance behind it. And to me, that's golden.
So I want, first of all, I want to thank you all, first of all, for the work that you've put into doing this and also your willingness to help get the word out. I will tell you this, that if, as this proceeds, if there's any indication that, geez, you know, we need to do another podcast, you know, to get some more information out, just contact Health Chatter and we'll get you on again.
You know, if there's updates or other things that have hit the scene, let us know. We'd love to have you back. So Allison, Amy, and in the back, and Tom, and in the back, Richard Corderone, who has provided some background information in addition to what, as we've been talking, that we'll definitely get on our website for all of you, our listening audience. So again, many, many thanks.
We have great shows coming up. Our next show, actually, we're going to be doing it this week, is on pediatric hematology, which is really, it's going to be interesting to dive deep into that subject. We're looking at pharmacy deserts. We're going to be doing a show, believe it or not, on health insurance. all the different types of health insurance.
And God help us to try to get through all of that. I have a feeling that's gonna definitely be more than one show, but many, many great shows on Health Chatter. So keep listening to us and everybody out in Health Chatter land, keep health chatting away.