Montana Turning Point Initiative
The Turning Point Initiative was initiated in 1997 by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Its mission was to transform and strengthen the public health system in the United States by making it more community-based and collaborative. The initial idea for Turning Point came from the foundations' concerns about the capacity of the public health system to respond to emerging challenges in public health, specifically the system's capacity to work with people from many sectors to improve the health status of all people in a community.
Turning Point's underlying philosophy was that public health agencies and their partners can be strengthened by linking to other sectors (not just the private health care sector, but education, criminal justice, faith communities, business, and others) because the underlying causes of poor health and quality of life are tied closely to social issues that are too complex to be approached by disease models of intervention.
Five national partners were included in the Initiative: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); The Public Health Foundation (PHF); American Public Health Association (APHA); Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO); and the National Association of Local Boards of Health (NALBOH).
In addition to the national partners, 23 state partners (including Montana), were funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to:
• Define and assess health, prioritize health issues, and take collective action
• Promote education to decrease the risk of infectious and chronic disease
• Strengthen environmental health services for clean air and water and safe food
• Gain access to health care for everyone
• Improve health status for minority groups
During the nine years that the Turning Point Initiative was operating (1997—2006), partners worked to modernize public health statutes, create accountable performance management systems, utilize information technology, invest in social marketing, and develop public health leadership. Montana is continuing that work through the Public Health System Improvement Task Force.
The Turning Point website of archived information is available at http://www.turningpointprogram.org/Pages/about.html
