Community Clinical Linkages ( Ccl ) - 1145 Words

Community clinical linkages (CCL) are critical approaches for improving population health in the United States. According to Starfield (1996) the â€Å"unstable coexistence between public health and medicine has not been beneficial to improving the health of the US population† (para.2). Despite the passage of the Affordable Care Act and its thrust to connect the clinical and community sectors, in 2016, these sectors continue to operate in silos. (CDC Practitioners Guide, 2016, Starfield, 1998, ACA, 2010). Were this not disturbing enough, clarity around a defined role for public health in CCL, remains undefined and unclear. Given this conundrum, one is unsure if this siloed approach continues across America, because it is comfortable, or because both the clinical and community sectors are unclear of how to move forward, in a coordinated, collaborative manner. Public health leaders have prioritized CCL as an effective approach to improving population health, but to get to the health outcomes that we seek, the community and clinical sectors must get there by design. The design needed to improve population health must include seven strategies addressed in the CDC Practitioners Guide. The first of these seven strategies is to learn about the sectors. So, before implementing a community-clinical linkage, the first step is to learn about and identify the unmet health care services and social needs of the community, including existing resources, organizations, health issues, policy,