Vivek Murthy Quotes

Vaccination and other essential preventive services must be delivered close within communities.

There is simply not enough money available to support a system in which the lion's share of expenditures is devoted to acute care, with virtually nothing being spent on preventive medicine, i.e. health care.

[Public Health] means the saving and lengthening of lives of thousands of citizens, the extension of the vigorous working period well into old age, and the prevention of inefficiency, misery, and suffering. These advances can be made by organized social effort. Public health is purchasable.

As 17th U.S. Surgeon General, I was privileged to serve as the nation's doctor. I focused much of my time on promoting proven programs and individual steps that lead to good health.

I think the problem with the country is that we operate on a sickness model, not a wellness model... Basically, we treat people who become ill. What we don't do is do a very good job in keeping them healthy in the first place...

We must form public-private partnerships to collectively improve children's health.

The Medical Society of Sedgwick County, the Kansas Hospital Association and doctors have really done some remarkable work on wellness-related issues.

CDC is supporting community efforts by establishing competitive grants to support local programs to help individuals and families to get healthy and stay healthy.

I loved clinical practice, but in public health, you can impact more than one person at a time. The whole society is your patient.

I think we need more community health programs and we need to develop programs that are low-cost.

Protecting lives means reshaping national policies from a community healthcare angle.

I want to thank the efforts of the American Public Health Association and its 200-plus partners who have organized events around the Nation that serve to raise everyone's awareness of the need to improve public health.

The job of the government - and my responsibility - is to help people live healthier lives. The framework is about giving local authorities the ability to focus on the most effective ways to improve the public's health and reduce health inequalities, long-term, from cradle to grave.

Since the reduction of risk factors is the scientific basis for primary prevention, the World Health Organization promotes the development of an integrated strategy for prevention of several diseases, rather than focusing on individual ones.

I want us to be judged by the impact we have on the health of the people of Africa and the health of women. Improvements in the health of the people of Africa and the health of women are key indicators of the performance of WHO. This is a health organization for the whole world... But we must focus our attention on the people in greatest need.

The objective of the World Health Organization shall be "the attainment by all peoples of highest possible level of health.

Communities across the nation play an important role in leading the way toward healthier families, and the Affordable Care Act helps make prevention an important priority for every community.

In a successful health system, the proportion of per-capita health dollars used for home care, outpatient primary care, and preventive services should actually increase, not decrease, relative to those for acute hospital care.

Well, the responsibility of the surgeon general is to make sure that the public has access to science and access to it in a way that is understandable and that is applicable to their everyday lives.

Whenever you have large numbers of people who are dying for preventable reasons, that constitutes a public health issue.

When I jump into something, I really do it to the fullest extent that my time and energy will allow me. I'm from Texas, and to see so many people that are obese and with disorders that are preventable. They haven't been shown or told. I'm really passionate about making sure my fellow countrymen are healthy. It's a shame.

With an annual investment of $66 billion by 2007, we can save 8 million lives each year.

I think we should put the same weight now on the co-factors as we have on HIV.

The health of the people is really the foundation upon which all their happiness and all their powers as a state depend.

I've always been interested in public health approaches because it seems to me we have this yearning for silver bullets, and that is not in fact how change comes about. Change comes through silver buckshot - a lot of little things that achieve results. That's a classic public health approach.