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This study examines the role that family physicians play in maternity care in rural communities across the US. Authors collected data from 185 rural hospitals and found that family physicians delivered babies in 67% of these hospitals and were the only doctors doing so in 27% of these hospitals. The results of this study reveal the importance of family physicians in providing maternal health care in rural America. The study’s authors stress the importance of adequate maternal care training for future family physicians who intend to practice in rural location during their residency training.

This model program, called Project ECHO, leverages technology to share knowledge across a wide network of disease-specific consultants and rural healthcare teams. In regular virtual meetings program participants learn from and alongside each other while also providing direct patient care, with the ultimate goal of  gaining crucial knowledge on how to assess and treat common medical conditions with complex treatment plans. The pilot program, run by Dr. Sanjeev Arora in his liver clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, saw the hepatitis C clinic wait list decrease from 8 months to 2 weeks, proving the efficacy of this innovative “telementoring” approach to tackling medical management knowledge gaps in rural and underserved areas. In 2016 Congress passed the “ECHO Act,” enriching Project ECHO as a national model for Health care collaboration in rural and underserved areas.

This op-ed discusses the minimal progress that has been made towards understanding the causes and treatment of long COVID. The main crux of the author’s argument is that long COVID is essentially the same condition as post-infectious syndrome or myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Thus, long COVID is actually not a new condition, but rather something triggered by acute COVID in the same way that many other illnesses can trigger ME/CFS in individuals. ME/CFS itself is not well-understood, but the years of research and patient experiences with the condition could be applied to the body of long COVID research for the advancement of both causes.

This study conducted interviews with public health professionals from local and state health departments to understand their experiences in providing comprehensive COVID-19 case investigation and contact tracing with refugee, immigrant, and migrant communities. The research identified six themes related to promising practices, including understanding the community and public health context, cultivating relationships, ensuring linguistic and cultural concordance, communicating intentionally, evolving response strategies, and implementing equity measures. These findings aim to inform proactive, community-engaged solutions for public health organizations working with these communities during public health crises, such as COVID-19, to improve collaborations and staff wellbeing.

This article discusses the Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts (FORE) distribution of $1.3 million in grants to organizations studying the potential permanent adoption of COVID-19 care access measures to promote health equity in opioid use disorder treatment. The grants aim to investigate the impact of temporary policies, such as virtual care, on access to care and patient outcomes. The studies will explore how relaxed prescribing policies for buprenorphine, telehealth strategies, and other COVID-19 measures have affected patient access and outcomes, particularly among underserved populations. The research will inform evidence-based policies to sustain access to better care beyond the pandemic and address the ongoing opioid crisis.

This article discusses the resilience of Indigenous communities in the Arctic during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite facing vulnerabilities such as limited access to healthcare and infrastructure, these communities had lower COVID-19 death rates compared to southern regions. The article highlights the importance of Indigenous health-care sovereignty and self-determination in controlling the spread of the virus. Indigenous-led decision-making, community-centered approaches, and cultural relevance played a crucial role in mitigating the impact of the pandemic. Recognizing and promoting Indigenous Peoples’ self-determination in healthcare is essential for developing sustainable health-care systems and addressing future health crises.

This chapter in a larger book on systems change dives into Human Impact Partners’s experiences centering racial justice and power-sharing at the heart of their work in public health. It offers guidance on developing shared understandings of oppressive structures and systems, relationship development, and centering the voices of people most impacted by systems in need of change.

A large school district in Cincinnati partnered with their local health department and children’s hospital to develop mitigation procedures as children returned to school. These mitigation procedures successfully limited school-based spread of COVID-19 by combining best practices in rapid testing, contact tracing, and early isolation. Procedures were regularly revisited and updated in an iterative process to respond to new information and circumstances.

Lead Local was a collaborative research project between Human Impact Partners and the Right to the City Alliance. The research focused on community power-building and its potential to address social inequities that drive health outcomes. This project was not specific to COVID-19, but its findings apply to disease response and resiliency. It found that community power-building must be central to decision-making processes for true transformation.

Johns Hopkins Health System and Baltimore community organizations collaborated to establish a bilingual COVID-19 hotline and implement free COVID-19 testing. When a vaccine became available, partnerships made within these efforts were leveraged and the coalition partnered with the state. This community-based approach was effective at expanding access to the COVID-19 vaccine among low-income Latino immigrants.