Question

In one page, examine the history and development of the Healthy People initiatives. Discuss some of the successes and shortfalls of the three initiatives thus far; including Healthy People 2000, Healthy People 2010, and Healthy People 2020. Be sure to include statistical data from the initiatives to support your position.

Answer 1

The Healthy People 2000 initiative, which set reducing health disparities as an a priori aim, identified 22 priority areas to be tracked and 319 national objectives to be achieved. All priority areas and national objectives were evaluated by the health disparities parameters, wherever data permitted. Systematic documentation and reporting of gaps in the data (by the inequality parameter subcategories) also began in this period.

As the various health disparities monitoring initiatives determined inequality parameters and health outcomes of interest and began tracking them, they discovered that data were unavailable for many inequality parameters. Nevertheless, the gaps in data were themselves systematically documented and used to improve the health disparities monitoring system.

In the final Healthy People 2000 report, these data issues were explicitly addressed and specific objectives were set, calling for:

1) identifying gaps in the data

2) establishing mechanisms to meet data needs for more granular racial/ethnic subgroups (e.g., American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, Black, Hispanic/Latino), and low SES categories.

The Healthy People 2010 documents also very clearly addressed remaining gaps in the data and called for multiple actors at different levels of the system and society to work to fill those gaps. They noted, for example, that data by sexual orientation were unavailable for all Healthy People 2010 outcomes.

In addition, in the 2010 final report, the documentation and reporting of gaps in data by health disparities parameters by each specific objective/outcome became much more systematic and explicit.