Healthy People

In 1979 the Surgeon General’s office published a report entitled Healthy People. From that publication sprang the Surgeon General's Report on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, which “described for the first time a national public health agenda” of specific health goals that if met, would improve the health of all Americans by 1990 (CDC.gov, 1989; healthypeople.gov, n.d.). The following year an adjunct piece was called “Promoting Health/Preventing Disease: Objectives for the Nation “ was published which contained “226 specific, measurable health objectives in a plan of action for reaching these goals which would in 1990 become the basis for Healthy People (CDC.gov, 1989). The Healthy People framework began in 1979 and with the help of the numerous government office, national, state and local organization and public health departments and was revised in 1990, 2000, 2010 and lastly, 2020. The latest Healthy People version contains more than 1,200 objectives with reliable data that provides a baseline measurement and specific targeted improvement for each established objective (healthypeople.gov, n.d.). The objecitves focus on strategies that could be implemented by an
Tackling the social determinants of health
2. Ensuring all people have access to health care and health education
3. Implementing evidence based health education and promotion in the public health sector
One of the most crucial topics a health educator can address is the Healthy People goal of using “health communication strategies and health information technology (IT) to improve population health outcomes and health care quality, and to achieve health equity, health” for all” healthypeople.gov, 2016). One of the objectives for this target area is to “Increase the proportion of health-related websites that follow established usability principles”. The baseline is 42 percent of health-related websites followed established usability principles in 2014, but the target is 55.7