Editorial
The Promise of MAPP: A Transformational Tool
for Public Health Practice
Erica Salem
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In 2001, the National Association of County and City
Health Officials (NACCHO) and Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) unveiled the latest pub-
lic health planning tool, Mobilizing for Action through
Planning and Partnerships (MAPP).
From a technical perspective, there is nothing par-
ticularly revolutionary about MAPP. The tool reveals
no big secret previously withheld from public health
practitioners and no great epiphany is likely to follow
a first look at the planning model. Rather than revo-
lutionary, as noted by Lenihan in this issue, MAPP is
very much evolutionary. MAPP reflects the latest think-
ing and approach to using planning as a tool in public
health practice.
Through MAPP, public health planning has evolved
from the more traditional needs assessment and pro-
gram planning approaches, typically addressing sin-
gle issues, to a model that is solidly grounded in
strategic planning concepts. This connection to strate-
gic planning is critically important, as local public
health agencies (LPHAs) are increasingly facing chal-
lenges of greater complexity, challenges that create the
need for strategic thinking.1 Simply put, old public
health planning approaches cannot sufficiently posi-
tion LPHAs to effectively address new public health
challenges.
Through MAPP, strategic planning evolves from a
process that usually occurs within a single organization
to one that occurs within an entire community. This re-
flects contemporary public health theory and practice.
No single organization—be it a governmental public
health agency, hospital, or provider association—can
by itself attain the outcomes needed to adequately ad-
dress the issues facing communities today. Effective
responses require collective action and collective ac-
tion requires both meaningful public health partner-
ships and an understanding of the resources in the com-
J Public Health Management Practice, 2005, 11(5), 379–380

C 2005 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Inc.
munity. By emphasizing participatory planning, MAPP
provides both of these.
Closely related to this, and central to MAPP, is the
concept of systems thinking. This notion is introduced
in the first phase of MAPP, which requires the iden-
tification and engagement of all partners—traditional
and new—that contribute to the health of the commu-
nity. This engagement of public health system partners
is the cornerstone of MAPP. The systems thinking con-
cept becomes more fully developed in the integration of
the four MAPP assessments, which include the appli-
cation of the Local Public Health System Performance
Assessment, developed by the CDC’s National Public
Health Performance Standards Program (NPHPSP).
Former planning models have worked with frag-
mented examinations of a community: health status,
program needs, or the role of its local health depart-
ment. MAPP’s systems approach encompasses a vari-
ety of perspectives to create a more complete picture of
how a community can take action not only to resolve
specific health issues but also to address the underly-
ing issues affecting the health of the public. Combining
these in an inclusive planning process, which includes
new and diverse partners, including the business com-
munity, leads to innovative strategies for address-
ing both longstanding and more recent public health
challenges.
MAPP’s foundation in sound planning principles
and its integration of performance standards, the pri-
mary tool of accountability that has evolved in pub-
lic health practice, combine to give the model a level
of integration not previously achieved in public health
planning.
Correspondence: Erica Salem, MPH, Chicago Department of Public Health, 333
S State St, Room 200, Chicago, IL 60604 (e-mail: salem erica@cdph.org).
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Erica Salem, MPH, is Assistant Commissioner, Chicago Department of Public
Health, Illinois. Ms Salem is also Chair of NACCHO’s MAPP Workgroup.
379
380 ❘ Journal of Public Health Management and Practice
While MAPP provides step-by-step guidance for
public health systems building, as evidenced by the
collection of articles in this issue, the model is not overly
prescriptive. Success is defined within a general frame-
work for local public health systems building, yet it
allows LPHAs and their partners to define their own
public health systems and how they should optimally
function. Like its planning forerunners (APEX, model
standards, etc), the articles in this issue suggest that
MAPP too will readily become part of public health
practice. But with its emphasis on systems building and
performance, MAPP may transform local public health
practice in a way not achieved by its predecessors.
This special issue of the Journal of Public Health Man-
agement and Practice captures both the history and,
through a series of case studies, the early implementa-
tion successes of MAPP and the NPHPSP’s Local Public
Health System Performance Assessment. Perhaps more
important, this issue reveals to its readers the promise
of MAPP. The articles that follow demonstrate MAPP’s
intellectual and methodological integrity. They show
MAPP’s movement from conceptualization and model-
building phase to a tool that is firmly taking root in
public health practice; a tool that contributes to aca-
demic thinking about public health competencies and
community-based participatory research; a tool that
can be studied.
While the individual successes of MAPP rest with
the localities that use the tool, the likelihood of posi-
tive outcomes and the successful integration of MAPP
into the nation’s public health practice landscape will
very much depend on the continued commitment and
involvement of NACCHO and the CDC. As a flagship
program of NACCHO, the membership organization
for local public health departments across the country,
LPHAs have access not only to this state-of-the-art plan-
ning tool but also to the trainings and technical assis-
tance that hundreds of practitioners across the country
have already taken advantage of. The continued sup-
port from the CDC not only provides resources to sup-
port implementation of MAPP but also adds a level of
credibility to MAPP that LPHAs can use when promot-
ing the model and engaging other public health systems
partners in these planning efforts.
For the past 15 years, since the Institute of Medicine’s
report on the Future of Public Health, public health agen-
cies have been looking for ways to strengthen their
effectiveness. Numerous planning models and concep-
tual frameworks have been developed, and by them-
selves, each has made some contribution to the ad-
vancement of public health practice. By combining
much of this thinking—needs assessment, program
planning, community engagement, core functions, per-
formance standards, and systems building—into a
single model, MAPP may very well be the first truly
comprehensive public health planning tool for local
public health practice, and as such a powerful tool for
transformation.
REFERENCE
1. Duncan WJ, Ginter PM, Reeves T, Samuelson CW, Fleenor ME.
Preparing for the future in a local public health organization.
J Public Health Manag Pract. 1998;4(5):13–25.