Strategies

Allow eligible patients to use marijuana for medical purposes; often called medical marijuana laws (MMLs)

Integrate legal services into health care settings to address legal issues that affect health (e.g., housing, food, utilities); services provided by private practice lawyers, law students, etc.

Provide medications such as methadone to individuals diagnosed with opioid use disorder in outpatient, residential, and hospital settings, usually with counseling and behavioral therapies; often called MAT

Provide an 8 or 12 hour training to educate laypeople about how to assist individuals with mental health problems or at risk for problems such as depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders

Maintain the current legal age when an individual can purchase alcoholic beverages; currently 21 years in all states

Provide a fixed, multi-component set of fall prevention interventions to older adults, usually in community settings, without an individualized risk assessment

Distribute Naloxone to trained community members and first responders to reverse opioid overdoses

Help men improve their parenting skills and fathering knowledge via a voluntary, comprehensive fatherhood program

Connect incarcerated fathers to their families and prepare them for release via small group education sessions that address fathering knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors

Establish voluntary formal groups of residents who work together to create a unified voice, enhance living conditions in their neighborhood, and address neighborhood concerns

Use regulation to extend nurse practitioners’ (NPs’) scope of practice to provide care to the full scope of their training and skills without physician oversight, especially for primary care

Provide home visiting services to low income, first time mothers and their babies, starting during pregnancy and continuing through a child’s second birthday

Improve work environments for nurses via establishment of strong nursing leadership, organizational support, etc.

Allow community members to gather, socialize, walk, run, bike, skate, etc. on streets temporarily to closed to motorized traffic; also called Ciclovía programs

Support outdoor pursuits and adventure-based activities that emphasize inter- and intra-personal growth through overcoming obstacles (e.g., challenge courses, wilderness excursions, etc.)

Engage community members to determine how public budgets are spent, ideally to improve neighborhood conditions and reduce inequality.

Use payments, vouchers, and other incentives to encourage patients to undergo preventive care such as screenings, vaccinations, etc.

Provide culturally sensitive assistance and care coordination, and guide patients through available medical, insurance, and social support; also called systems navigators

Use visual tools to prompt safe practices, standardize communication, and ensure no step is forgotten before, during, or after a medical procedure or other health care situation

Support joint decision making between health care practitioners and patients through shared decision making (SDM); part of patient-centered care

Engage practice coaches or facilitators to work with primary care clinic staff to redesign clinical practices, organize quality improvement efforts, improve communication, share best practices, etc.

Use databases, housed in state agencies, to track prescribing and dispensing of Schedule II, III, IV, and V drugs and other controlled substances

Make pricing for hospital procedures and other health care services publicly available, often via websites, online databases, report cards, or similar tools

Provide interpretation services for patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) in outpatient and inpatient health care settings, following training and certification

Establish programs that accept expired, unwanted, or unused medicines from designated users and dispose of them responsibly

Bring people with diverse values and perspectives together to engage in facilitated, inclusive, and informed dialogues about a topic of public concern. Examples include Citizens’ Initiative Reviews, deliberative polling, citizen juries, and citizen’s assemblies.

Lend materials, offer gathering space, and provide educational, civic, and social programming; open to the community and publicly funded

Make clinician, hospital, clinic, long-term care facility, and insurance plan performance on health care quality measures publicly available via report cards, reporting websites, or similar tools

Make health care facilities’ health care-associated or hospital-acquired infection (HAI) rates readily available to patients and providers

Allow adults to possess a limited amount of marijuana for personal, non-medical use

Apologize for the history and legacy of slavery and provide direct payments or community investments to Black descendants of people enslaved in the U.S.

Educate owners, managers, servers, and sellers at alcohol establishments about strategies to avoid illegally selling alcohol to underage youth or intoxicated patrons

Repeal government control over retail sales of alcoholic beverages, allowing commercial retailing of those beverages

Conduct individual assessments that gauge older adults’ risk of falling and develop personalized approaches to help prevent falls

Increase enforcement of laws that prohibit alcoholic beverage service to intoxicated customers, usually with fines, imprisonment, or revocation of a license

Require a minimum age for sellers in off-premise locations that sell alcohol and servers and bartenders in on-premise locations

Adopt laws that hold private property owners who provide alcohol to minors or obviously intoxicated individuals on their property liable if someone is killed or injured as a result

Support individual and group use of internet-based tools to receive news, communicate or share information, collaborate on ideas, mobilize networks, and make collective decisions

Provide objective, normative information to reduce college students’ misperceptions about alcohol use and, ultimately, change their drinking behavior

Coordinate access to services across delivery systems and disciplinary boundaries (e.g., housing, disability, physical health, mental health, child welfare, workforce services, etc.)

Establish state level regulations that require nursing homes to employ at least a set number of licensed and non-licensed nursing staff, often set in terms of staff hours per resident day

Provide sterile injection equipment and often other treatment and referral services to people who inject drugs; also called needle or syringe exchange programs and needle syringe programs

Support and strengthen traumatized and distressed residents and communities and address effects of community trauma (e.g., poverty, violence, structural racism, etc.) via a comprehensive, multi-stakeholder, and multilevel approach

Shift the way health care organizations approach trauma by adopting universal trauma precautions and providing trauma-specific care

Provide all students with the information and skills to prevent alcohol use; programs can be delivered via a specific curriculum or as a component of classroom behavior management

Create financial incentives or remove financial disincentives to affect consumer choices and incentivize provision of cost efficient health care services

Use the purchasing power of employers and groups of insured individuals to create incentives and disincentives for health care providers to deliver high quality, high value care

Increase the number of registered voters through initiatives that reduce barriers and expand accessibility, including automatic voter registration (AVR), voter registration drives, easing voter registration requirements, and expanding registration sites

Increase voter turnout through get-out-the-vote campaigns and initiatives to make voting more convenient such as allowing early in-person voting, vote-by-mail, or expanding polling locations and hours

Teach students attitudes, skills, knowledge, and behavior needed to participate in and contribute to a democracy