Group items tagged

"stimulating a movement in which communities are convening stakeholders across sectors to pursue shared goals and collect data to track progress.23 Clinicians and health care systems find it unrealistic and overwhelming to tackle complex social problems, but they are not alone. Teachers, police officers, parents, employers, and many others also feel powerless to solve social problems without partners. Meaningful change requires broader thinking than what Chetty et al recommend: "changing health behaviors among low-income individuals." As the history of tobacco control teaches, multilevel interventions across the socioecological framework-from legislation to marketing-are essential to advance population health. A culture of collaboration across sectors provides a venue for medicine and public health to join forces with business leaders, school systems, the park authority, investors, retailers, the media, and community groups. Each sector can bring their respective skills to the task, together accomplishing more by leveraging resources and talent than any sector could achieve alone. A medical journal article reporting that income is significantly associated with life expectancy is a call to arms, but the answer cannot come from medicine or public health alone but from the health professions working with partners who share an interest in prosperity and good health. Finding common causes, bridging silos, and leveraging talents hold the promise of much deeper influence and benefit than yesterday's fragmented efforts could achieve."

Why data resource profiles (DRPs)? We can't do epidemiology without data. Data are cen- tral to epidemiology's three main challenges: to describe health states in populations, make inferences about their causes and to apply that knowledge to improve health. The more high quality data we have to support these three tasks, the better.10,11 The challenge of providing health data coverage on a global scale is immense. Termed a 'scandal of invisi- bility', in the world's least developed countries more than two-thirds of all births and deaths go unregis- tered.12 Meanwhile, in advanced industrialised na- tions publicly funded data collection systems are under threat, particularly at a time of state retrench- ment.13 In the UK and Canada the long-form census was cancelled. Canada, too, cancelled some of its premier longitudinal studies of children and youth, leaving the country with little signal about the state of human capability development of its future gener- ations. Removing parts of the publicly funded health information infrastructure is easy, but rebuilding sur- veillance will require orders of magnitude more vision, dedication and money.

A population approach to obesity reduction

"The link between air pollution and dementia remains controversial-even its proponents warn that more research is needed to confirm a causal connection and work out just how the particles might enter the brain and make mischief there. But a growing number of epidemiological studies from around the world, new findings from animal models and human brain imaging studies, and increasingly sophisticated techniques for modeling PM2.5 exposures have raised alarms. Indeed, in an 11-year epidemiological study to be published next week in Translational Psychiatry, University of Southern California (USC) researchers will report that living in places with PM2.5 exposures higher than the Environmental Protection Agency's standard of 12 μg/m3 nearly doubled dementia risk in older women. If the finding holds up in the general population, air pollution could account for roughly 21% of dementia cases worldwide,"

This article speaks to the contrast Geoffrey Rose drew, but extended beyond the arena of population health. "Real reductions in drug supply and demand will come through improving public health and safety, strengthening anticorruption measures - especially those that combat money laundering - and investing in sustainable development. We also believe that the smartest pathway to tackling drugs is decriminalizing consumption and ensuring that governments regulate certain drugs, including for medical and recreational purposes. "

"Medicare had created a national database showing how long it took hospitals across the country to get heart patients' arteries opened. It was a bell curve year after year, and the times were not getting any better. But there were a few hospitals at the tail end of the curve that year after year were treating people in an hour or so. Dr. Krumholz and his colleagues visited the 11 best performing hospitals. They were not famous institutions or major medical centers, said Elizabeth Bradley, a professor of public health at Yale and a leader in the project. Some were community hospitals; others were far from major population centers. The investigators recorded every detail of how the hospitals got things done and ended up with a short list of what the stellar performers had in common - procedures Lourdes later adopted."