Prevention Matters

Chris Norwood, the founder and Executive Director of Health People: Community Preventive Health Institute in the South Bronx, has a column in the Huffington Post in which she stakes a strong claim for community-based prevention as part of health reform.

"For the United States, health reform without a clear plan to mobilize community groups nationwide to put proven prevention programs right in place where they are most needed, will not be "reform", but a continuing disaster in which people are simply more equal in being able to obtain expensive medical "care" for dehabilitating conditions that often could have been prevented," she writes.

"We will be able to judge both the real intent of the medical industrial complex - and the Obama Administration and the Senate and Congress - by their support for community-based prevention," she continues. "Right now, it is still routine to read in discussions of healthcare reform that "real" reductions in our overwhelming rates of chronic disease aren't possible---and that it just not true. What analysts who say that are not admitting is that while the ordinary ways of the health care system--drugs, "treatments", surgery, etc.---cannot reduce chronic disease rates, getting prevention out of the health care system, itself, can."

In 2005, Norwood was one of 1,000 women from around the world chosen for a groundbreaking Nobel Peace Prize nomination honoring women’s local work.