Translating Public Health to Law and Policy: Writing

Teaching public health law, public health policy, and related classes, it comes to my attention that students often have difficulty translating public health into language that lawyers, law-makers, and policy types understand. I find that the biggest problem is a cultural one.

Public Health

Public health is a field that is focused on (1) evidence and (2) ethics to drive its decision-making. First, public health relies on evidence. That reliance requires public health students to be able to support their assertions with scientific evidence and, in the absence of data, very educated guesses. That information is presented in extreme detail with discussions of the limitations of the evidence, methodological issues, and statistical issues involved in the data. Second, public health is primarily concerned with an ethic that values social justice. This isn't in opposition to law and policy. I find though that in public health the complexity of the ethical and moral issues are often lost in a broader context and there is a diminished focus on issues of distributive justice.

Law and Policy

In contrast, governance has different values. Key here are three: 1. ambiguity, 2. parallel processing, and 3. ethics. First, governance relies on evidence but operates in an environment of ambiguity where different values and issues vie with evidence to provide justification. Here the evidence is not on the "correct" position but evidence for the "best" position to take given a highly context-driven set of circumstances and ambiguity. Traditional public health students are not prepared to make presentations or provide information to meet these needs. Second, governments and policy makers operate on parallel processes. Simply, governments do not make decisions in a serial fashion. Instead, many decisions are being made at the same time. This puts an extreme time constraint on the public health practitioner to get the message across to the policy maker. It also requires that the public health practitioner understand the overal values that drive the parallel decision-making. Third, ethics. Governance also operates with an ethic but unlike public health, it operates within a larger framework of rule of law, distributive justice and procedure. These ethical concerns can be in harmony with public health ethics, but the practitioner in public health cannot ignore these larger issues.

The Fix 

How do you fix this? I try and fix it by teaching basic policy in all my courses, requiring students to give presentations in the pecha kucha format and recommending two books. The first is a classic: On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by Zinsser. I always recommend this book to students who often fail to read it. Not reading this book can have a demonstrable effect on your grade in classes I teach. The second should be a classic: Effective Lawyering: A Checklist Approach to Legal Writing and Oral Argument. I have no idea what's up with the price on Parrish and Yokoyama but I recommend it more highly than Zinsser if you need to get your writing up to speed quickly for law and policy audiences. While designed for lawyers, it is just as applicable to the public health student who needs to write a policy brief. If you are studying public health or public health policy, these two books can help you translate from the public health mindset to make convincing arguments for law and policy types.