REVIEW article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Education and Promotion
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1601406
This article is part of the Research TopicCatalyzing Public Health Leadership Research, Practice, Education, and TrainingView all 9 articles
The Role of the Chief Health Strategist in Community Health Improvement: A MAPP 2.0 Counterproposal
Provisionally accepted
- University of Kentucky, Lexington, United States
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In the past 10 years, several significant national initiatives have released updated strategies and guidelines to improve public health practice specifically as it relates to community health improvement. These initiatives include the 2016 release of Public Health 3.0 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH) which defines the concept of the Chief Health Strategist as a leader in the community's health improvement efforts. Also, in 2022, the Public Health Accreditation Boards (PHAB) released guidance for community health improvement through a revised set of accreditation standards and measures which included a list of suggested models such as Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships (MAPP) to guide the process. Lastly, a revised model, MAPP 2.0, was released in 2023 to provide updates to NACCHO's (National Association of County and City Health Officials) original model for community health improvement. Despite valuable information for a collaborative approach to community health improvement found in 2022 PHAB accreditation standards and measures and MAPP 2.0, the role of the Chief Health Strategist from Public Health 3.0 is missing. This manuscript describes the importance of the role of Chief Health Strategist, in community health improvement, through the lens of community trust-building, ability to galvanize community group membership in the process, and the ability to utilize systems thinking and decision-making to create a counterproposal to the guidelines of MAPP 2.0.
Keywords: Chief Health Strategist, Community health improvement, Trust, Decision Making, Community partners
Received: 27 Mar 2025; Accepted: 09 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Carman and Pendergrass. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Angela Carman, University of Kentucky, Lexington, United States
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