Issue Overview

This month's supplement of the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Under-served (JHCPU) features manuscripts that are directly or indirectly influenced by Dr. Daniel Blumenthal's leadership and research over the span of nearly 30 years. Dr. Blumenthal served as Chair of the Department of Community Health and Preventive Medicine (CH/PM) at the Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) for over 25 years. During his tenure, the department became a national leader in educating and training medical and public health professionals, conducting community-based participatory research, building community partnerships and coalitions, and developing effective health education/health promotion programs.

One such program is the Annual Public Health Summit, which began in 2007 as a local observance of National Public Health Week. The Public Health Summit at MSM educates public health students, medical students, residents, practicing physicians, public health professionals, researchers and community members about emerging public health issues that have focused on emergency preparedness, cancer, HIV/AIDS, and cardiovascular health. After Dr. Blumenthal retired as chair in 2009, CH/PM held a Festschrift in honor of him in 2010 and declared all future Public Health Summits as the Dr. Daniel S. Blumenthal Public Health Summit to honor Dr. Blumenthal's career accomplishments and contributions to the field of public health.¹ The prevailing theme of the festschrift papers in this volume is the identification and employment of specific strategies to address poor health outcomes.

One paper describes the efforts of CH/PM's Center for Service Learning to educate medical students to serve medically disadvantaged populations through service-learning projects (McNeal and Buckner). McKenzie and Braithwaite provide commentary on the importance of sound strategies in effective and sustainable coalition building. The Center for Sexual Health provides an overview of its activities aimed at eliminating sexual health disparities through the development of public health professionals (Bayer). Rust et al. posit that health inequities in the U.S. can decrease through implementation of the "triangulating on success" model that partners researchers, medical care providers, and public health professionals to achieve health equity. Authors Akintobi et al. discuss how the effectiveness of specific evaluation methods can improve programs that seek to decrease the incidence of HIV/AIDS in the South.

The other set of papers published in this supplement directly reflect Dr. Blumenthal's enduring contribution to Morehouse School of Medicine in the area of cancer control and prevention. Specifically, these papers highlight a project funded by a grant through the REACH U.S. program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The title of this project, for which Dr. Blumenthal serves as Principal Investigator, is the Southeastern U.S. Collaborative Center of Excellence in the Elimination of Disparities, or SUCCEED. SUCCEED is one of 18 Centers of Excellence in the Elimination of Disparities (CEEDs) located throughout the United States. The CEEDs serve as national resource centers that provide training and technical assistance in evidence-based health interventions, program implementation and evaluation, dissemination, capacity-building, and community coalition building. The health priorities that are the foci of the REACH US program are breast and cervical cancer, infant mortality, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hepatitis, immunizations, and tuberculosis. Each Center selects one of these health areas as it affects one of five ethnic/racial groups: African Americans, Latinos/Hispanics, Asian Americans, Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, and American Indians/Alaskan Natives.

The focus of SUCCEED is the reduction and elimination of the disease burden for breast and cervical cancer as it affects African American women in the tri-state region of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. SUCCEED's partners in this project are the Fulton County Department of Health and Wellness, Emory University's Prevention Research Center, the Medical University of South Carolina's Hollings Cancer Center, and the Comprehensive Cancer Control Collaborative of North Carolina (located within the University of North Carolina Prevention Research Center). Through these partnerships and a host of local community-based organizations, a regional infrastructure of community and academic partners has been established committed to reducing breast and cervical cancer disparities in African American women.

The SUCCEED papers for this supplement reflect an...