Baker Lecture reflects on public health report

BOWLING GREEN, O.—Dr. Hugh H. Tilson, one of the original authors of the Institute of Medicine's 1988 report on “The Future of Public Health,” will give the ninth annual Ned E. Baker Lecture in Public Health Thursday (April 3) at Bowling Green State University.

He will address the impact of the report 20 years later when he speaks at 2 p.m. in 228 Bowen-Thompson Student Union.

Tilson, who is a member of the clinical faculty of the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, has spent the majority of his career in public health. For 15 years, he worked for Multnomah County (Portland, Ore.) as a public health officer and human services director, where he pioneered Portland's “Project Health,” which is widely cited as a prototype for national health-care financing under a “managed competition” model. He also was state public health director for North Carolina.

In 1976, he was president of the National Association of City and County Health Organizations (NACCHO). He spent 15 years with the Wellcome Foundation, now GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), as a pharmacoepidemiologist.

Tilson earned his medical degree from Washington University (St. Louis) and a doctoral degree in public health from the Harvard School of Public Health.

A founding member of the UNC Institute for Public Health, Tilson is also a Senior Fellow for Maine's Center for Public Health, where he is credited for creating the Sagadahoc County (Bath) Maine Public Health Department, Maine's first county public health agency. He continues to serve as a volunteer county health officer for the department.

Sponsoring his Bowling Green address are the College of Health and Human Services, the National Association of Local Boards of Health (NALBOH), the Cove Charitable Trust of Boston, the Northwest Ohio Consortium for Public Health and the Wood County Hospital Foundation.

Following his lecture, Tilson will answer questions emailed to baker@bgsu.edu .

NALBOH was founded by Ned Baker, a BGSU graduate and Bowling Green resident who served on the Wood County Board of Health for 12 years, including two terms as president. The lecture named in his honor is simulcast to local health boards nationwide through the Internet, at http://wbgu.org/baker .

CEUs are approved for nursing, social work and registered sanitarians. For more information about CEUs, contact Jennifer Wagner at jawagne@bgsu.edu.

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(Posted March 28, 2008 )