Official Site of The State of New Jersey
Healthy New Jersey
History of Healthy New Jersey
The New Jersey Department of Health (NJDOH) was initially accredited by the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) in 2017. PHAB requires that state health departments develop a state health assessment and state health improvement plan every five years. Prior to applying for initial accreditation, NJDOH had no overarching, multitopic health improvement plan, but did have a state health assessment initiative called Healthy New Jersey (HNJ). Thus, it was decided to also use the HNJ platform as a basis for our first health improvement plan. This changed the purpose of HNJ from merely tracking data points toward target values to a Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. It also shortened the assessment time frame to five years.
Healthy New Jersey’s Connection to Healthy People
Prior to accreditation, Healthy New Jersey (HNJ) was modeled after the federal Healthy People initiative. Healthy People (HP) provides science-based, national goals and objectives with 10-year targets designed to guide national health promotion and disease prevention efforts to improve the health of all people in the United States. For more than four decades, HP has established benchmarks and monitored progress over time in order to:
- Identify nationwide health improvement priorities.
- Increase public awareness and understanding of the determinants of health, disease, and disability and the opportunities for progress.
- Provide measurable objectives and goals that are applicable at the national, State, and local levels.
- Engage multiple sectors to take actions to strengthen policies and improve practices that are driven by the best available evidence and knowledge.
- Identify critical research, evaluation, and data collection needs.
HP is managed by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
New Jersey developed its own state-level version of the initiative each decade. For HNJ, New Jersey adopted the vision, mission, and overarching goals of HP but tailored objectives to the health issues facing residents of New Jersey. While many of HNJ’s objectives were the same or similar to those of HP, there are also many in HNJ that were not in HP and vice versa. Additionally, the targets set for achievement by the end of each decade in HNJ were based solely on New Jersey baseline data and therefore differed from the targets presented in HP which were based on national-level data.