Is Public Health's Multisectoral Mission Achieving Its Promise in the United States?

This chapter examines the progress and limitations of public health's current approach to cross-sector collaboration and offers insights about paths forward. The chapter covers some of the contemporary conflicts that have been illuminated in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the calls to address systemic racism as a public health issue. One of the hallmarks of public health is the recognition that improving a population's health requires consideration of structural and systemic drivers that extend across all sectors. Given this context, cross-sector collaboration should have a mechanism to lift up less dominant views of health across cultural groups (for example, more holistic considerations of health across physical, mental, environmental, and spiritual domains) as well as those that may exist in other sectors to accelerate improvements in population health outcomes.