A Movement in the Making: Building Collaborations with Public Health Experts and Policymakers

For public health to meet the challenges of COVID-19 and beyond, to increase evidence-based decision making, and to realize public health as a public good, we need a broad, intentional movement to build coalitions among public health experts in academia, research, practice, and the public sector. The authors discuss how failure to invest in public health systems, inadequate health communications, and poor public health practice during the COVID-19 pandemic opened the door for informal systems of information sharing and the consequences thereof. The lesson that public health professionals and public health associations need to draw from the COVID-19 pandemic is that communicating effectively is critical to ensuring that evidence, even emerging evidence, guides decision-makers. We discuss the challenges of evidence-based decision-making in public health policymaking and highlight examples of academic institutions that have invested in public health knowledge translation. Finally, we describe how the Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) degree was designed to bridge communities of practice, and what is needed for those with DrPH training to stand up and meet the moment.