Report back from 139th American Public Health Association Meeting

I just returned from the American Public Health Association’ s 139^th Annual Meeting held in Washington DC.   I had the opportunity to meet many dedicated public health professionals (13,000 people attend this meeting.)  This year’s theme was “Healthy communities promote healthy minds and bodies.”

There were so many sessions and posters I could not get to everything that I want to see.  Here are a few of the highlights from the sessions I was able to attend:

• Learning about ways people use social and mobile media to improve community health
• Hearing stories of the art of creating successful injury prevention initiatives, including great stories from Trauma Foundation’s Andrew McGuire.
• Great panels sponsored by the Family Violence Prevention Forum where I heard Anne Demers from San Jose State University describe her work with Iraq and Afganistan veterans to prevent family violence and Institute of Medicine’s Deepali Patel share about IOM’s Forum on Global Violence Prevention,
• Hearing Joe Vess and Neil Irvin from Men Can Stop Rape describe their work with men in colleges and the military
• A session on social justice perspectives on capacity building to promote the health communities
• Some thought provoking presentations from CDC’s Division on Violence Prevention on leveraging systems to prevent family violence where they discussed different types of evidences (including contextual and experiential evidence) and how complex science is useful in violence prevention decision-making.

If you were able to attend this conference, what were your highlights?