New Year, New Perspectives

The final comic strip of Calvin and Hobbes speaks to the understated genius of author Bill Watterson. Calvin and the tiger Hobbes are walking in a waist-deep field of snow discussing how “the world looks brand new…like having a big sheet of white paper to draw on.” Calvin turns to Hobbes and says “It’s a magical world ol’ buddy…lets go exploring” as they sled down the hill and out of the frame.

I grew up reading Calvin and Hobbes in our daily newspaper and I like to bring this philosophy that I learned as a child to my work as an adult. Calvin is able to view his world in new ways that seem foreign to the adults that surround him – especially his long-suffering teacher. He is creative and irreverent in such a way that forces children and adults alike to question long-held beliefs. This is a viewpoint I would like to carry forward into the New Year with the Bree Collaborative.

The New Year is an opportunity to take what is useful from the past year and discard what is not. We have learned a lot about how to create recommendations, but still have far to go to adopt these guidelines into practice. So in the spirit of improvement for 2019, I have a request for feedback from our public health and health care community:

• – Are these blogs useful updates on the content and progress of our work?
• – How else can we communicate with those who are interested in hearing from us?
• – I want to make sure that our topics reflect issues that matter to our community. What feedback do you have about how and what we select for our topic areas?
• – Our workgroups are made up of clinical experts that represent different stakeholder groups but I want to make sure that we are including everyone who should be at the table without creating workgroups that are too large. Who else should we include in our workgroups? How can we improve this process?
• – How can we be more transparent in how we develop recommendations?
• – What can we do to better support community adoption?
• – Send us your comments on our online survey here

Let us know what you think and if we ever have more than one inch of snow in Seattle I welcome you to join me in creating a snow goon inspired by my favorite comic strip.

Ginny Weir, MPH
Director, Bree Collaborative