International Journal of Collaborative Research on Internal Medicine & Public Health Vol 13 No. 2 (2021) 1032 Infrastructure Matters: A New Model for Strengthening Public Health Dennis D. Lenaway 1* and Leslie M. Beitsch 2 1Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine, Florida State University College of Medicine, Tallahassee, Florida, USA; 2 Department of Community Medicine, Mahatma Gandhi Medical College and Research Insitute, Pondicherry, India * Corresponding author: Dennis D. Lenaway, Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine, Florida State University College of Medicine, Tallahassee, Florida, Tel: 772-888-6124; E-mail: ddlenaway@gmail.com Description The global public health response to the Covid-19 pandemic has seen basic functions, such as surveillance, laboratory tesing, and contact tracing, sretched beyond surge capacity. Similarly, previous responses to emerging or re-emerging public health hazards have exposed serious and long- sanding defciencies in our public health capacity [1]. When funding has been dedicated for novel outbreaks and urgent public health threats, it is typically episodic, fragmented, and unsusained. The quesion becomes how can we better undersand and communicate our urgent need for subsantial and susainable invesments that provide a public health infrasructure necessary for addressing current and future threats? [2,3]. We feel srongly that public health mus srategically make the case that srengthening the public health sysem and improved health outcomes are linked in a manner that esablishes infrasructure as an essential prerequisite. To help policy-makers and public health leaders more efectively make their case for increased funding, we proposed a new conceptual model that describes in simple terms how invesments in infrasructure, using our knowledge of essential functions and foundational public health services, creates the building blocks upon which individual public health programs can succeed in protecting and promoting the public’s health while preventing disease [4]. In this commentary, we share the basic conceptual model and highlight several meaningful approaches that support agencies, organizations and insitutes in building susainable public health infrasructure and capacity. The Proposed Model The US public health community has made great srides towards defning public health, what consitutes public health infrasructure and organizational capacity, and how to defne and measure improvements [5]. Following the publication of the Insitute of Medicine’ s report The Future of Public Health [6], a serious decades-long sepwise approach involving local, sate, federal, tribal, territorial, academic, and philanthropic participation has clearly defned public health’s core functions and essential services, esablished rigorous sandards and metrics, and provided a framework for accrediting public health agencies [7,8]. Our proposed model seeks to merge the public health concept of translating knowledge into action with our desire to srengthen our public health sysem. In our model “knowledge” of infrasructure and organizational capacity is defned by EPHS (Essential Public Health Services), accreditation sandards and measures, and core competencies for public health professionals; and “action” is a measure of srengthening organizational and workforce capacity (i.e., public health infrasructure). As viewed in Figure 1, it follows that our foundational knowledge of essential public health services provides the framework for the development of organizational sandards and measures that are used to defne a public health agency’s core functions and expected performance. As you apply this knowledge to build organizational capacity, you are simultaneously improving and srengthening the infrasructure that supports the multitude of public health programs that impact health outcomes.