Public Health Shows Up Everywhere

For 10 years, so has the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health

Public health is the reason your drinking water is clean. It’s seatbelt laws that have quietly saved millions of lives and air quality alerts that tell you whether it’s safe to step outside. Public health is the infrastructure of conditions that allow people to be well.

“Public health is more than just the absence of disease,” says Paul Halverson, dean of the Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health. “It’s about creating opportunities for people to live, work and play — to be their best selves, in communities that support everyone’s wellness.”

This means thinking upstream and recognizing that solutions aren’t always straightforward. Telling a parent their child needs to exercise more lands differently when the neighborhood doesn’t have sidewalks safe enough to walk on or parks to play in. The goal, as Halverson puts it, is to make the healthy choice the default choice.

Ten years ago, Oregon got its second accredited school dedicated to that work. What the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health has accomplished since is a story best told not in statistics, but in the moments and places where public health shows up, which, it turns out, is everywhere.

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Article written by Lauren Valenti