Statewide Health Improvement Program
Creating a healthier community together
SHIP works to prevent disease before it starts by helping create healthier communities that support individuals seeking to make healthy choices in their daily lives.
Sharing successes
- More physical activity and better nutrition for Minneapolis preschoolers (PDF: 166KB/1 page)
- Rochester area businesses offer employees the environment to get and stay tobacco free (PDF: 166KB/1 page)
- Active living now easier in Waite Park (PDF: 166KB/1 page)
Tackling our biggest health problems
In Minnesota and nationally, the two largest causes of chronic disease and premature death are obesity, caused by poor nutrition and insufficient physical activity, and commercial tobacco use. We MUST do something to address these problems as individuals, as communities, and as a state.
Reducing health care costs
To really make a dent in health care costs, we must think in terms of preventing illness, not just treating it. In Minnesota, adult obesity-attributable medical expenses are approximately $1.3 billion (2003) and direct medical costs due to tobacco use are almost $2.9 billion (2007). Lowering these costs must be part of any health reform effort.
Focusing on sustainable solutions
SHIP works in the areas of community, school, workplace and health care toward sustainable, systemic changes that create widespread, lasting results.
Instead of focusing on individual behavior change that may be hard to maintain over time, SHIP makes sustainable changes that support individual choices about health. For example,
- Rather than only try to convince people to walk more, with SHIP local communities may see the need for more sidewalks so that people CAN walk more.
- Rather than only asking people to eat healthier, with SHIP a school may decide to work with local farmers to bring in fresh produce for the students.
- Rather than only asking people to quit smoking, with SHIP more owners of multi-unit housing may make their buildings smoke-free.
Meeting local needs
Strategies that work best in Minneapolis may or may not be the best way to go in Rock County or the Grand Portage Reservation. Therefore, MDH supports local public health and tribal health agencies by gathering together science-based best practices, offering technical assistance, and assisting in evaluation. Local public health professionals then choose from a menu of proven strategies what works best for them.
Leading the nation
Through SHIP, MDH has taken a national leadership role in transforming public health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) looks to SHIP as they work to improve health a national scale.
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What’s New
- Building Community Capacity for Prevention: A Plan to Implement Statewide Strategies through Hospitals and Health Plans Community Benefit Investments report to the Legislature is now available
- Breastfeeding—Supporting a Healthier Generation from the Start fact sheet for clinicians (PDF: 370KB/2 pgs)
- Minnesota Department of Health awards Statewide Health Improvement Program (SHIP) grants to fight chronic disease
Locally driven plans will create sustainable, systemic changes to support healthy choices
- The Minnesota Department of Health has been awarded a $3.6 Million Community Transformation grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Chronic Diseases and Their Risk Factors in Minnesota: 2011:
New report examining the state of chronic diseases and their risk factors (pdf 3.09mb, 42 pages)
- contact us:
Health.OSHII@state.mn.us