Building More Equitable Communities Through Public Health Law

November 19, 2024 | Dawn Hunter

Every week, my husband and I place a grocery order. We shop at an employee-owned supermarket chain known for its workplace culture. Sometimes we order online and pick it up, sometimes we have it delivered, and sometimes we do the shopping ourselves. In any case, we often purchase our groceries without much thinking—if we order online, we are prompted to “buy it again” and even in person we tend to buy the same staples. Prices are higher online than in store. In addition, we live in a community where plastic bags are still an option, but we used to live in a community where plastic bags are banned.

Why am I sharing all of this? Nearly every aspect of our weekly grocery trip is shaped by the law. Laws impact:

• Food placement, packaging, expiration dates, and prices.
• Employee wages and benefits.
• Store location, hours, and accessibility.
• Availability of rideshare drivers for delivery orders.
• Whether to choose paper or plastic.

Law impacts the way we experience our everyday lives by establishing the framework in which we operate. The grocery store is just one example of how law can shape our decisions and, more importantly, our choices. Because it shapes the resources and opportunities available to us, law is an important determinant of health.

Exploring the Landscape of Public Health Law

What we think of as “law” can take many forms. It includes statutes, regulations, case law, organizational policy, and budgets, and how they are interpreted and enforced. The law can be a set of requirements or prohibitions, establishing norms and expectations for our behavior as individuals, organizations, and systems. The law can also be the processes and procedures associated with creating laws, making decisions, and interpreting existing laws.

Public health law, specifically, is important as a field because it includes the laws that are designed to protect and promote the public’s health and that define the power of the government to act on our behalf. In fact, law is behind every public health success of the 20^th century. A 1999 issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report listed vaccinations, motor vehicle safety, safer workplaces, healthier moms and babies, and recognition of tobacco as a health hazard among those successes. These achievements would not be possible without the law, including:

• School vaccination laws.
• Helmet and seatbelt laws.
• Speed limits.
• The Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
• Food fortification.
• School lunch programs.
• The Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program.
• Newborn screening.
• The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.
• Clean indoor air laws.

At the same time, these laws have not benefited everyone equally. In fact, they have often operated as a tool of racism and other forms of structural discrimination. The lesson here is that the law can create the conditions that lead to differences in health outcomes, but it can also create the conditions for equity.

The Civil Rights Movement and Advances in Health Equity

One must look only to the civil rights movement to see the potential. As just one example, today’s robust network of Community Health Centers was born from the activism of the Black Panther Party, which established free health clinics in response to continuing discrimination in the healthcare system, as well as the work of H. Jack Geiger and Count D. Gibson Jr., who established the first community health centers in 1965. The success of these efforts led to funding for additional community health centers through President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity as part of his War on Poverty.

In fact, key legislation enacted during the civil rights movement led to significant, even if insufficient, improvements in health outcomes for Black Americans. For example, there is evidence that women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act all led to improvements in premature mortality and infant mortality, among other benefits. The enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010 and the resulting adoption of Medicaid expansion saw similar success. There is ample evidence of the Medicaid expansion impact on health outcomes and financial well-being, both at the individual and population level.

Addressing the Training Gaps in Public Health Law for More Equitable Public Health Practice

The fact that law shapes how we experience our lives on a day-to-day basis is perhaps the most important reason that public health professionals should understand the relationship between the law and health outcomes and how to use the law to achieve more equitable, thriving communities. However, knowledge of public health law continues to be one of the biggest training gaps in the public health workforce.

The 2021 Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey, conducted by the de Beaumont Foundation and ASTHO, found that strategic and systems thinking was one of the top training needs as well as an increased interest in policy engagement and topics related to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (visit the 2021 Dashboard). Another report in 2021, “Challenges and Opportunities for Strengthening the US Public Health Infrastructure: Findings From the Scan of the Literature” by the National Network of Public Health Institutes, found a need for increased awareness among the public health workforce of the legal basis for public health authority and identified both how to influence law and policy development and how to understand the effects of law and policy on health among the top training needs.

These findings align with public health accreditation standards. Whether or not you work for an accredited health department, the Public Health Accreditation Board Standards and Measures serve as a guidepost for the practice of public health. There are two specific domains where this is relevant: domains 4 and 5, as detailed in Table 1.

Table 1. Public Health Accreditation Board Guidance for Equity

Domain	Measure	Examples
Domain 4: Strengthen, support, and mobilize communities and partnerships to improve health.	Measure 4.1.3 A: Engage with community members to address public health issues and promote health.	Making the decision-making structure inclusive and transparent to empower community members or developing mechanisms for shared ownership in the process. Enhancing residents’ capacity to understand levers of power or influence in policy change.
Domain 5: Create, champion, and implement policies, plans, and laws that impact health.	Measure 5.1.2 A: Examine and contribute to improving policies and laws.	Assessment of the impacts of the policy or law on equity. Input gathered from stakeholders or strategic partners.

Lessons Learned: Involving and Empowering Communities

The inclusion of community members in assessment, decision-making, and capacity-building efforts to understand levers of power or influence reinforce key lessons learned in the past three years, spurred by COVID-19 and the racial justice movement of the summer of 2020:

• The first lesson is the need to recognize and rectify historical injustices. It is important that we understand the historical legal context behind current health inequities. We must know and name the problem to solve it.
• The second is the need to rectify current inequities by analyzing and assessing the ways in which our current system of laws is creating and reinforcing inequities.
• The third is the need to engage impacted people in identifying, designing, and implementing solutions.

One of the lessons learned from the work of Geiger and Gibson was that there is a difference between what the health system thinks people need and what communities think they need. It seems we are still trying to learn this lesson today.

Leveraging Law to Drive Equity and Make Public Health More Trustworthy

Law is the only way to truly change the game for inequities. It can give a voice to historically marginalized people by creating pathways to ensure inclusion and representation in the political process. It can also change systems and institutions by changing the way they operate and the way that people within those systems operate. Additionally, it can serve as a tool to enforce conditions that will lead to more equitable outcomes and to hold people in positions of power accountable.

We have often heard in the past few years about the need to rebuild trust in public health. I’d like to reframe that to think about how we make public health as a field more trustworthy. It starts by increasing our understanding of the authority of public health to promote the public’s health and to use that authority to create systems in which we all can thrive.