Vol. 14 (2022): Working Title: Institutional Strategies to improve Impact on People's Health: Health Workforce Education and Train in Context and Community Engagement

Dear Reader,

Living with Global Health Equity requires that everyone holds a fair and just opportunity to live healthily.  To live healthily, we first need to address obstacles to access, such as poverty, poor quality education, housing stability, safe environments, technology, and transportation. Furthermore, we must integrate them into medical and public health programs and regions that are often isolated from growth and innovation. Additionally, we also need to grow the availability of integrated healthcare teams where medical professionals from different fields collaborate with those community workers who have lesser healthcare training but still perform essential tasks and activities.   

To achieve global Health Equity, we need:

1) Our higher education institutions to be driven by socially responsible standards. These will help them prepare a workforce that responds effectively to society's and people’s needs. Social accountability and responsibility become an emerging contemporary issue in medical and health professionals' education.

2) To learn with and from each across countries and institutions. Meeting current and future health needs of society and people requires that healthcare workers have the skills that cover all sectors including social, environmental, and technical content in addition to stronger interpersonal and leadership skills. A disciplined approach to continuous improvement will help drive change.

We can measure our progress toward global Health Equity by putting systems in place to measure our impact on society. We need to measure and track our impact on policies, practice, and performance of the health system in the communities we serve. Studying accurate impact ensures that we are addressing society's evolving needs regardless of the political and economical state in the region. This also helps healthcare professionals prepare for situations such as a pandemic, one which brings with it an increased risk to certain minorities, including violence, disparity, racism, and more. Assessing the effect of our work on health systems and society is clearly challenging as it is often influenced by a multitude of complexly interlinked and dynamic factors, many of which are not within the control of our respective institutions.

This edition, written by “pracademics”, focuses on research that has worked toward the reduction of healthcare inequities and improvement of the impact on people’s health. Parts of it shed a spotlight on intimate partner violence statistics during the COVID-19 pandemic, innovation in authentic learning through the use of moulages, and the impact of social responsiveness on empathy, community, and healthy partnership. 

Sincerely,

Nicholas Torres and Aricia De Kempeneer

Executive Director and Programming Director