Public Health Impact Initiative

Through funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Zilber School of Public Health has built a collaborative intervention-based (non-research) initiative focused on improving birth outcomes in Milwaukee focused on three main areas:

1. Strategies to Encourage Safe Sleeping
2. Creating a Data Infrastructure to Support Practice and Innovation
3. Interventions to Increase Healthy Births

Within each area are components carrying out specific strategies.  Links to detailed information about each component are listed to the right.

Through these activities, the Public Health Impact Initiative has brought together UWM faculty across several disciplines, as well as strong community partners, including:

• City of Milwaukee Health Department
• COA Youth and Family Centers
• Downtown Health Center
• Healthcare providers such as Wheaton Franciscan-St. Joseph, Columbia St. Mary's, Medical College of Wisconsin, and Aurora Health Care
• Federally Qualified Health Centers
• House of Peace Nursing Clinic
• Infant Death Center of Wisconsin
• Milwaukee Fetal and Infant Mortality Review Case Review Team
• SERVE Marketing (a not-for-profit, public service marketing firm)
• United Way
  
• Wisconsin Public Health Association
• Wisconsin Center for Health Equity
  

The Initiative is led by the leadership team of Ron Cisler (Center for Urban Population Health, UW-Milwaukee), Eric Gass (City of Milwaukee Health Department, UW-Milwaukee), and Geoffrey Swain (City of Milwaukee Health Department and UW-Madison).  In addition to overseeing the currently-funded projects under this initiative, the leadership team is working to build a sustainable collaborative that can work to address broad public health issues in the Milwaukee area.