Brazil’s community health workers go global—England borrows a playbook on equity
This piece reports on England’s move to adapt elements of Brazil’s community health worker approach as part of primary care reform. The central argument is that “reverse innovation”—learning from health systems in middle-income settings—can strengthen frontline care capacity and help narrow health inequities. It positions community health workers as a practical bridge between services and communities, with potential system-level effects on access and continuity.
Why it might matter to you:
Workforce and delivery models shape whether prevention and behavior-change programs (including diet-related services) actually reach people who need them. This example can inform how you frame implementation questions—what is transferable, what needs local redesign, and how to evaluate equity impacts when scaling community-based interventions.
Behind the prison death numbers: who measures, who gets believed, and what gets fixed
This Ahead-of-Print article focuses on oversight of deaths in carceral settings and the role of independent scholarship in accountability. It foregrounds how definitions, data access, and institutional incentives shape what gets counted as a “carceral” death and how quickly problems are detected. The framing emphasizes that mortality surveillance is not only technical but also governance: who has authority to audit, interpret, and compel action.
Why it might matter to you:
If you work with population health datasets, this is a reminder that measurement systems can create blind spots that distort risk estimates and trends. The article’s accountability lens can help when you assess data provenance, missingness, and bias—especially for marginalized populations that are often excluded from standard health surveys.
Antiracism, but operational: turning critical race praxis into practice-ready public health research
This review examines how Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP) has been used in practice-focused research, positioning racism as a public health problem that contributes to health and healthcare inequities. While evidence linking racism to health is well established, the article highlights gaps in actionable research that supports the design, implementation, and evaluation of antiracism interventions across settings such as communities and healthcare systems. It synthesizes current applications of PHCRP to provide a baseline for future work and offers recommendations aimed at strengthening evidence-based antiracism practice.
Why it might matter to you:
Many nutrition-related inequities are shaped by structural conditions; PHCRP offers a way to translate that reality into explicit research decisions (questions, measures, and intervention logic). The review may help you pressure-test whether studies are merely describing disparities or are designed to evaluate interventions that can plausibly change them.
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