Watch: Healthiest People 2030 wants to hear from you!

The nation’s public health officials are calling on you to get involved in Healthy People 2030, the new set of health objectives for the coming decade.

"We’re really hoping that our public health stakeholders can help us define where we’re going to go in the next decade," said Carter Blakey, deputy director of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, during an interview with APHA TV last November in Atlanta. "We'd like people to understand that what they say, what they want and their vision for the next decade really counts."

Planning is already underway for Healthy People 2030, with a proposed framework that includes a number of foundational principles for guiding its development. Among those principles are goals of eliminating health disparities, achieving health equity, and strengthening the physical, social and economic environments that impact people’s health and well-being. The current decade’s initiative, Healthy People 2020, has more than 1,200 objectives and 42 different topic areas.

Blakey called on attendees at the 2017 APHA Annual Meeting and Expo to attend public meetings on the new plan and get actively involved in its development. Meetings of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for 2030, a federal advisory committee of independent experts, are open to the public and announced via the Federal Register, on the Healthy People 2020 listserv and on social media.

If fact, you should sign up today to subscribe to the Healthy People listserv and start following the initiative at @GoHealthyPeople.

"The public health audience is crucial to our effort," Don Wright, MD, MPH, acting assistant secretary for health at HHS, told APHA TV during last year’s Annual Meeting. "We covet their feedback, their comments and being part of the process."

Visit APHA TV to watch and share the full episode as well as all the episodes from Atlanta. And visit HealthyPeople.gov to learn more about Healthy People 2030 and read more about its new iteration at The Nation’s Health.

For more video from APHA 2017, register for APHA Live. APHA Live includes on-demand, online access to 13 of the top sessions from the APHA Annual Meeting and the opportunity to earn more than 16 free continuing education credits. For even more educational programming from APHA 2017, consider RAMP, which includes synced PowerPoint presentations and voice recording of scientific sessions from the Atlanta meeting.