Health Equity

Health equity depends on data equity: the representation of communities in the data used to identify disparities, target interventions, and hold systems accountable. More

Building narrative power, a foundational strategy used in community organizing, involves dismantling dominant narratives that uphold inequity and constructing counternarratives that advance health equity and racial justice by reshaping how people make sense of the world. More

Racial equity impact assessments (REIAs) are used by local governments to integrate equity considerations into policymaking and decision-making processes by evaluating potential impacts of proposed legislation before enactment. More

Public health science gains in the last quarter century in the United States have been formidable due to a focus on structural and social determinants of health, thereby enhancing understanding of the role of inequitable policies in shaping health inequities and inequitable access to ameliorative resources. More

Racial disparities—unequal outcomes between racial groups—persist in the United States, particularly with respect to health and economic outcomes. There has been increased focus on the ways in which upstream determinants of health contribute to these disparities; however, little is known about how forced inaction on these upstream determinants affects health and economic outcomes. More

I recently attended a National Institutes of Health (NIH) meeting concerned with criminal justice interventions. Speakers emphasized the importance of involving people with lived experience—which everyone understood to mean persons who have experienced arrest and incarceration. More

In our bitterly partisan age, where science and public health are distrusted, even denigrated, there is a better part of America. More

We broaden our understanding of community power by going beyond traditional measures of voting and voting rights. Our objectives are to (1) create county-level measures of community power that are more expansive than voting and (2) explore the descriptive and geographic patterns of community power. More

The implications of the Department of Justice’s action to eliminate the “disparate impact” test, which provides the legal foundation for removing discriminatory barriers in public health and health care. More

Despite spending more per capita on healthcare than any other nation, the United States experiences declining life expectancy and increasing chronic disease burden—a paradox reflecting fundamental limitations in the current treatment-centered, facility-based care system. This paper introduces Neighborhood Nursing, an innovative universal care infrastructure designed to shift the US healthcare toward proactive, prevention-centered care organized geographically in neighborhoods. More