The Future of Population Health 

A slide show featuring The Milbank Quarterly centennial issue themes and selected articles.  More

This year marks the 100th anniversary of The Milbank Quarterly.  More

A public policy agenda that aims to address inequities related to the well-being of children, creation and perpetuation of residential segregation, and racial segregation can address upstream factors.  More

Policies that redress oppressive social, economic, and political conditions are essential for improving population health and achieving health equity. Efforts to remedy structural oppression and its deleterious effects should account for its multilevel, multifaceted, interconnected, systemic, and intersectional nature.  More

Increased recognition of the negative consequences of a medicalized view of health is essential, with a focus on education and training of clinicians and health care managers, journalists, and policymakers.  More

The commercial determinants of health (CDH) framework can inform public health policy, practice, and research in ways that contribute to overcoming the world’s most serious public health challenges.  More

Solutions to mitigate and adapt to climate change can have important health cobenefits. A vital component of these policy solutions is that they must also take into consideration historic issues of environmental justice and racism, and implementation of these policies must have a strong equity lens.  More

In this Perspective, using the United States as a case study, we review existing literature regarding societal ideologies, policy, research, and practice toward immigration and immigrants, with a focus on gains and successes to promote immigrant health, continuing problems that have implications for immigrant health, potential solutions, and implications for public health over the coming decades.  More

Cities are the spaces in which people live, work, and play, and they are also environments that shape the health, culture, and organization of populations in the 21st century.  More

From Aristotle to Fredrich Engels, great thinkers have hypothesized that access to resources, such as knowledge, money, health care, and housing, are more important for health than any medicines a physician could offer.  More

This perspective highlights the tectonic changes in US states’ policy contexts in recent decades and their profound impact on population health.  More

Notwithstanding its status as a world leader in developing the latest health care advances as well as for spending on health care, the United States has continued to fall behind other developed countries in health rankings.  More

The health of urban populations is dramatically influenced by the urban context, including its social, economic, environmental, and political conditions, in both positive and negative ways.  More

The Dobbs decision reversed a nearly 50-year precedent of constitutionally protected federal access to abortion nationwide, relegating its legal oversight back to individual states and territories. In the absence of a constitutionally protected right to abortion care, states are now free to set strict legal parameters around access to abortion.3  More

In this commentary, we focus on data equity in racialized and minoritized groups by commenting on the institutional commitments, notably community-partnered initiatives put forth as priorities by the Biden Administration in 2021.  More

Profound racial inequities were entrenched in crucial domains of American life long before COVID-19. In the wake of the pandemic, these preexisting disparities deepened.  More

Preterm birth (PTB)—birth before 37 completed weeks of pregnancy—is among the most important indicators of a population’s health. It is the…  More

The goal of this paper is to paint a broad picture of findings related to income support and child health.  More

We reviewed some of the recent advances in education and health, arguing that attention to social contextual factors and the dynamics of social and institutional change provide critical insights into the ways in which the association is embedded in institutional contexts.  More

This Perspective demonstrates that housing insecurity—which encompasses the dimensions of housing unaffordability, inaccessibility, and inadequacy—is a major public health issue with strong ramifications affecting households, neighborhoods, and cities.   More

Emerging scholarship has situated policing as an undeniable social determinant of health and wellbeing in the United States. Still, progress in understanding the precise role that law enforcement plays in the production of population health has been slowed by significant, long-standing data limitations.   More

The most recent figures for the United States are startling (even for an obesity researcher): 42% of US adults were classified as being obese in 2017.  More

In this paper, we summarize past successes, ongoing challenges, and potential solutions to address substance use and overdose in the context of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention efforts.  More

In principle, older adults have access to a wealth of health-promoting upstream, midstream, and downstream policy supports, which improve economic security, increase access to a wide array of long-term care services, and ensure access to basic medical care. Although considerable attention has been focused on threats to the old-age welfare state, ranging from long-term financing problems to attempts to roll back benefits, administrative barriers to these programs already threaten their effectiveness.  More

This article summarizes past gains and successes in US mental health, outlines failures and continuing problems, and discusses solutions, with an eye toward the role of social policy.  More

In 1986, I had dropped out of graduate school and was working as a temporary typist to pay my rent. I happened into a job with an alcohol policies project started by the Trauma Foundation, an injury prevention organization housed at San Francisco General Hospital. That was the beginning of my public health career and my focus on alcohol policies.  More

Firearm injuries constitute a major US public health crisis that requires urgent attention. Fatality rates have increased 34.9% over the past decade…  More

As Elizabeth Milbank Anderson was establishing the foundation for the Milbank Memorial Fund in the beginning of the twentieth century, Henry Ford was…  More

There is growing evidence that the basic infrastructure of the public health system in the nation has eroded to the point that its capacity and capabilities to adequately protect the nation are in doubt.  More

A new vision for the field of public health emergency preparedness for the future, one that is integrally connected to a future vision for public health.  More

As the public health sector begins an unprecedented data modernization effort, scholars and policymakers should ensure ongoing reforms are aligned with the five components of an ideal public health data system: outcomes and equity oriented, actionable, interoperable, collaborative, and grounded in a robust public health system.  More

Public health is vulnerable to judicial rulings in this new conservative era.   More

The United Nations (UN) created the World Health Organization (WHO) as its first specialized agency out of the ruins and atrocities of World War II.…  More

To meaningfully impact population health and health equity, health care organizations must take a multipronged approach that ranges from education to advocacy, recognizing that more impactful efforts are often more complex or resource intensive.  More

In widely quoted ecological analyses, primary care is associated with population health.1,2 Not only with population health,3,4 but with health…  More

This article considers the actions needed to recruit and retain a diverse population health workforce that meets population needs, and the policies needed to support this workforce to successfully address population health.  More

US health care reform over the past decade has placed substantial focus on rewiring health care financing, specifically increasing provider accountability for utilization (i.e., cost) and/or outcomes.  More