For nearly six decades, Bill Keck has expanded the frontiers of public health practice with curiosity, courage, and an extraordinary capacity to bring people together. He has challenged conventional boundaries between medicine and public health, academia and practice, research and application, and national and international perspectives. More than once, he entered territory where few had gone before and then built a path for others to follow.

Bill’s trailblazing in public health began long before he became a national leader. After earning his MD from Case Western Reserve University and completing a year of residency in internal medicine, Bill and his wife, Ardith, moved to Bolivia, where he served in the Peace Corps as a public health physician for three years. When Bill returned to the United States, his first public health position took him to Hazard, Kentucky, a town of about 8,000 people, where he became known as “the long-haired hippie doctor who didn’t want to make money.” (Peace Corps Online) It was there that he met Doug Scutchfield, who would become a lifelong friend and colleague. Together, they would go on to co-edit Principles of Public Health Practice through its first three editions, with the fourth edition carrying their names in its title: Scutchfield and Keck’s Principles of Public Health Practice.

In 1976, Bill and Ardith moved to Akron, Ohio, where Bill was appointed director of the Akron Health Department. He would remain in that position for 27 years. Those years established Bill as a steady and courageous public health leader, willing to tackle difficult issues even when doing so was unpopular, whether regarding abortion regulations, anti-smoking legislation, or HIV/AIDS, he provided a calm voice grounded in science.

By the 1990s, Bill’s influence had extended well beyond Akron. In 1991, he served as president of the American Public Health Association. In 1998, he became chair of the Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice, established to implement recommendations emerging from the Public Health Faculty/Agency Forum, which had been created at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 1990 to help bridge the academic-practice divide. (Public Health Foundation) Through the Council on Linkages, where Bill served as chair for 26 years, he helped advance efforts that would shape public health practice guidelines and public health systems and services research, and influence graduate public health education. The work was fundamentally about connection: connecting education to practice, research to real-world problems, and academic institutions to the communities they were meant to serve.

But it was Bill’s work connecting the Akron Health Department with Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine (NEOUCOM) that would become one of his most enduring contributions to the field. In a landmark 2000 article in the American Journal of Public Health, Bill was the first to use the term “Academic Health Department” to describe formal partnerships between governmental public health agencies and academic institutions.¹ The concept was straightforward but transformative: create sustained partnerships in which students could apply what they learned in real-world public health settings; academic and practice partners could conduct practice-based research together; and public health practitioners could pursue formal education while remaining connected to the work of their agencies. Bill conceptualized the Academic Health Department as the corollary to the partnership between a medical school and a teaching hospital, which we know as the academic medical center. The problem that Bill described was the disconnect between academic public health and public health practice; as a result, few faculty in academia have ever worked in a governmental public health agency and only a minority of public health practitioners have had formal public health education training or degrees. In part in recognition of this work, in 2002, Bill was awarded the Sedgwick Memorial Medal for Distinguished Service in Public Health, the American Public Health Association’s oldest and most prestigious honor.

That commitment to connecting public health practice and academia continued into the 2000s and 2010s. Working with colleagues at the Public Health Foundation, Bill helped establish the Academic Health Department Learning Community in 2011. (Academic Health Department Learning Community) It has grown into a community of more than 1,500 members, providing a platform where public health academicians and practitioners work together to create opportunities for students to learn within health departments, develop practice-based research, and bring health department staff into the classroom as teachers and collaborators. In this way, Bill’s legacy is not simply a collection of programs or publications. It is a way of thinking about public health: that practice and education are stronger when they are inseparable, that communities should be partners in producing knowledge, and that the health of populations depends on institutions learning to work together.

Bill’s commitment to that principle also led him beyond the United States. His passion for public health systems capable of addressing the needs of entire populations drew him in the late 1990s to the Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba (MEDICC). Since 1997, MEDICC has organized firsthand learning experiences in Cuba for more than 3,000 health professionals, policymakers, foundation trustees, community leaders, students, and faculty from 120 U.S. medical, public health, and nursing schools. (MEDICC) Bill has served MEDICC in a variety of capacities, including editor-in-chief of MEDICC Review, vice-chair of its Board of Directors, and executive director. In 2014, he and colleague Gail Reed published “The Curious Case of Cuba” in the American Journal of Public Health, introducing a new generation of public health leaders to Cuba’s approach to health care and population health.² The article examined how Cuba had achieved health outcomes comparable to those of substantially wealthier countries, including the United States, while spending considerably less.

Whether in Bolivia, Hazard, Akron, the national public health community, or Cuba, the geography changed, but the question remained remarkably consistent: How can public health systems better serve entire populations? He did not simply advocate for stronger public health systems; he created relationships, institutions, educational models, and communities that made those systems possible. And he did so with a conviction that public health is ultimately about people and populations — not institutions for their own sake.

Bill has taught, encouraged, challenged, and inspired generations of public health professionals, many of whom have carried his ideas into their own communities and institutions. A person of profound grace and integrity, Bill’s leadership has been marked by a calm presence, a source of deep wisdom and inspiration. He has spent his career reminding us that trailblazing in public health is not necessarily about standing out in front. It is about seeing a better path, having the courage to take the first steps, and then turning around to make sure others can walk it with you.

References

1. Keck CW. Lessons learned from an academic health department. J Public Health Manag and Pract. 2000;6(1):47-52.

2. Keck CW, Reed GA. The curious case of Cuba. Am J Public Health. 2012;102(8):e13-22.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Paul Erwin, MD, DrPH, CPH, is Dean of the School of Public Health, University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is board certified in internal medicine and public health and preventive medicine, a Fellow of the American College of Preventive Medicine, and an associate editor of the American Journal of Public Health.

 

Edward L. Baker MD, MPH, currently serves as Adjunct Professor at UNC, Harvard, and Indiana University schools of public health. Previously, he served as Director of the North Carolina Institute for Public Health at UNC, Assistant Surgeon General in the US Public Health Service, Director of CDC’s Public Heath Practice Program Office, Deputy Director of NIOSH, and Associate Professor of Occupational Health at Harvard.

Ron Bialek, MPP, has been serving as President and CEO of the Public Health Foundation (PHF) since 1997. He has focused PHF’s efforts on developing and implementing innovative strategies for improving performance of public health agencies and systems. Initiatives include developing performance management and quality improvement tools and training for public health professionals; developing the consensus set of Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals through the Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice; and creating the nation’s most comprehensive population health learning network – TRAIN.