School of Public Health can improve local care

Sentara Healthcare’s announcement last week that it will provide $2 million each to Old Dominion and Norfolk State universities to launch a joint School of Public Health is positive news for our institutions. But it’s even better news for the surrounding community and areas beyond Hampton Roads.

This development would expand the region’s public health expertise and capacity, encourage more research and better coordination, and, most important, improve health-care outcomes.

Sentara’s generous gift would help make possible the first accredited School of Public Health in the commonwealth. Achieving accreditation is a long, exacting process, but we are ahead of the game in several respects, including already having the required number of faculty members and degree tracks. But we want to be more than what is minimally required of a School of Public Health, which is why the collaboration between our two institutions is so important.

NSU and ODU serve students who are representative of our regional population. Many are first-generation and Pell-eligible students from homes that have at times experienced the social determinants that contribute to health inequality, including financial challenges, food insecurity, lack of health insurance and institutional racism. The joint project of an accredited School of Public Health is about much more than academic accomplishments. It’s also about the obligation of institutions of higher education to make our communities better and healthier places to live through workforce development, applied research and outreach.

A School of Public Health would expand and strengthen the region’s workforce pipeline, allowing us to graduate more Masters of Public Health, Doctors of Public Health, nurses and other health care professionals. Sadly, our battle with the coronavirus has laid bare the dangerous repercussions of that shortage, with an insufficient number of public health workers available to perform testing, contact tracing and vaccinations.

We also expect the school will make us more competitive for federal and philanthropic grants in areas like disease prevention and health promotion from such institutions as the National Institutes of Health, the Health Resources & Services Administration, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Gates and Robert Wood Johnson foundations.

We intend to leverage funds from those grants to reduce health disparities in our region — a crucial goal of this initiative. Hampton Roads suffers from among the greatest health disparities among urban areas in the commonwealth. Average life expectancies in this region are markedly lower than the state and national averages due to significantly higher rates of cancer, heart failure, diabetes and stroke as well as lower birth weights.

The $10 million Sentara Healthier Communities Fund will also provide $3 million to encourage collaborative public health ventures among Old Dominion, Norfolk State and Eastern Virginia Medical School and an additional $3 million to community agencies and partners.

This will yield another significant benefit for Hampton Roads: a better coordinated health sciences ecosystem. The COVID crisis has also shown what can go wrong with a lack of coordination in our health care system. Our institutions aim to achieve a closer articulation between our academic programs, including nursing.

Old Dominion and Norfolk State have had a long history of working together, and this would not be our first joint degree. Our institutions have offered a doctorate in clinical psychology since 1978. We’ve also received joint grants and collaborated on such academic programs as cybersecurity, fine arts and applied sociology.

We’re eager and ready to take the big steps forward to improve health care for our neighbors. In fact, we feel so strongly about this initiative that we are seeking funding jointly from the 2021 General Assembly session for this important purpose.