Social Determinants Of Health

Fatima Cody Stanford, MD, MPA, MPH, FAAP, FACP, FAHA, FTOS, is an obesity medicine physician, internist and pediatrician at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School. She is the director of diversity at the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Harvard, director of MGH Neuroendocrine Anti-Racism Initiatives, and member of the MGH Mongan Institute for Health Policy and Midlife Women’s Health Center Leadership Team.

HHS recently announced its Healthy People 2030 initiative to address what the agency called the “most critical public health priorities and challenges” in the United States over the next decade.

Approximately 37.7 million adults living with school-aged children and 2.9 million K-12 schoolteachers have definite or possible risk factors for severe COVID-19, according to research published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham’s department of family and community medicine has received a $7 million grant to help increase the number of PCPs in rural and urban underserved communities in the state.

Leaders in public health held a discussion during the National Medical Association’s virtual convention about how the COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting the Black community and other communities of color in the United States.

Many older adults were not ready to shift to telehealth services during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to research published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Among adults younger than 75 years, those with multiple social determinants of health were at more than a 2.5-fold greater risk for stroke than those without any, according to new data from the REGARDS study.

Expanding access to birth control through policies that allow pharmacies to prescribe them may not effectively address disparities in birth control use, according to research published in Health Affairs.

The United States Preventive Services Task Force has developed a plan for creating primary care-based recommendations regarding social determinants of health, according to a position paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Although COVID-19 has significantly affected people across the world, in the U.S., racial and ethnic minority groups have had a particularly high burden.