Rowitz On Leadership

With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, an increasing acceptance of the importance of both prevention and preparedness, knowing that knowledge management is a good thing, a stress on informatics development, improving access to health care, an awareness of the need to bring together the multifaceted nature and parts of health and health care, the idea of creating a national cultural orientation to health becomes important. It is not that we need to collapse all the health professions into one universal category, but rather we need to make collaboration and partnership our modus operandi. With an awareness that a move to health and a culture of health is also multifaceted, the social determinants of health was a beginning to our understanding of the values associated with health.. A culture of health model is a political, economic, social, personal, family, community, and political set of decisions. Our challenge is that it is not easy to change culture.

Although leadership with a title is an important dimension, the creation or development of a health mindset for all Americans is the end goal. All must take a leadership stance if a true culture of health is to come into being. Each of us must take responsibility for the change since each of us has to personally change our health habits. It is of course critical that our health professionals become more expert in the practice of leadership. Leadership development on the ground will be important. The use of social media will need to increase but in the end relationships and relationship-building will be the secret weapons for bringing a new age of health into being.

To change mental models oriented toward treatment and rehabilitation to a culture of health model with a prevention orientation, public health leaders will need to be proficient in the skills of systems thinking, communication skills, knowledge of the sociological process of cultural systems design(understandingof how mental models can be changed), psychological processes related to behavior change, policy development and advocacy, models of collaboration, informatics, and organization management.