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The Partners for Advancing Health Equity (P4HE) Resource Library is a virtual portal containing action-oriented health equity research, practice, and policies. The library aims to increase equity in health by offering free access to field-tested, evidence-informed and evidence-based programs strategies and high-quality research.


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  • Background: Health behavior theories are scientific frameworks used to inform health behavior interventions to address health-related issues, given their use in understanding and modifying behavior change.Purpose: We aimed to assess how theory-informed health behavior interventions utilize health equity frameworks and methods.Methods: Using the PRISMA guidelines, we conducted a scoping review of…
    March 2025
    Policy and Practice
  • Policy PointsThe structural determinants of health are 1) the written and unwritten rules that create, maintain, or eliminate durable and hierarchical patterns of advantage among socially constructed groups in the conditions that affect health, and 2) the manifestation of power relations in that people and groups with more power based on current social structures work—implicitly and explicitly—to…
    February 2024
    Social/Structural Determinants
  • Strategies such as diversifying the public health workforce; building capacity related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging; and conducting research on oppression are necessary but insufficient to improving health in communities that have been marginalized by systems of oppression. Working toward health and racial equity requires changing the structural drivers of health. Public health…
    October 2023
    Systemic Determinants
  • Purpose of review: Global disparities in HIV infection, particularly among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM), indicate the importance of exploring the multi-level processes that shape HIV’s spread. We used Complex Systems Theory and the PRISMA guidelines to conduct a systematic review of 63 global reviews to understand how HIV is socially patterned among GBMSM. The…
    July 2023
    HIV
  • The current state of the world: The world is once again going through immense change and disruption: from the global pandemic and the disproportionate impact on poorer nations and classes to the murder of George Floyd and the return to prominence of the fight for racial equality; from the urgent fight for the rights of women highlighted by the reversal of Roe vs Wade in the US, the recent…
    June 2023
    Advocacy
  • Context: Within the field of public health, there is growing awareness of how complex social conditions shape health outcomes and the role that power plays in driving health inequities. Despite public health frameworks lifting up the need to tackle power imbalances to advance equity, there is little guidance on how to accomplish this as an integral part of health promotion.Objective: …
    January 2023
    Policy and Practice, Social/Structural Determinants, Systemic Determinants
  • Chronic diseases are increasingly responsible for the burden of health outcomes across the world. However, there is also increasing recognition that patterns of chronic disease outcomes (e.g., mortality, quality of life, etc.) have inequities across race, gender, and socioeconomic groups that cannot be solely attributed to these determinants. There is a need for an organizing framework which…
    September 2022
    Social/Structural Determinants, Systemic Determinants
  • This three-part series highlights learnings from Lead Local: Community-Driven Change and the Power of Collective Action, a collaborative effort funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that convened well-respected local organizations and leaders in the fields of community organizing, advocacy, and research to examine the relationship between health and power building. Building on the National…
    June 2022
    Community-rooted/Participatory Research, Systemic Determinants
  • Power is a growing area of study for researchers and practitioners working in the field of health policy and systems research (HPSR). Theoretical development and empirical research on power are crucial for providing deeper, more nuanced understandings of the mechanisms and structures leading to social inequities and health disparities; placing contemporary policy concerns in a wider historical,…
    November 2021
    Policy and Practice, Systemic Determinants
  • This article has four aims. First, we briefly review the basic principles and processes described in life course theory. Second, we discuss racial residential segregation (RRS) and disproportionate rates of Black premature mortality as examples of systemic and structural racism (i.e., racialized policies and practices), which operate as fundamental drivers of the social and health inequities…
    September 2021
    Policy & Law, Racism
  • Background: Given the potential of intersectionality to identify the causes of inequalities, there is a growing tendency toward applying it in the field of health. Nevertheless, the extent of the application of intersectionality in designing and implementing health interventions is unclear. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the extent to which previous studies have applied…
    July 2021
    Interventions
  • In the 5 years since one of us published “#BlackLivesMatter — A Challenge to the Medical and Public Health Communities” in the Journal,1 we have seen a sea change in the recognition of racism as a durable feature of U.S. society and of its high cost in Black lives. Elected officials, corporate leaders, and academics alike use the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” which has also been widely adopted by…
    December 2020
    Social/Structural Determinants
  • Colonization is a fundamental determinant of Indigenous peoples' health. Indigenous is a term defined by dislocation, and the effects of that displacement are felt by Indigenous peoples around the world. Aug 9, International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, is a chance to look at the continuing effects of territorial removal, the destruction of people, culture, and languages, and the lack…
    August 2020
    Policy & Law, Social/Structural Determinants
  • We tend to study health inequalities as differentials in disease and death that exist within a population. But the most important cause of health inequality is social stratification, and social stratification only varies between populations. Here, I highlight a way forward in the study of health inequality that resolves this mismatch of analytical levels: we must study the fundamental causes as…
    February 2020
    Social/Structural Determinants
  • Transgender people experience intersecting forms of social marginalization and are disproportionately affected by health inequities. We elucidate a novel conceptual framework for transgender health research that theorizes the constructs and pathways through which social inequities produce health inequities for transgender populations. Drawing on theories of intersectionality and structural…
    October 2019
    Systemic Determinants, Transphobia
  • Community-based participatory research (CBPR) answers the call for more patient-centered, community-driven research approaches to address growing health disparities. CBPR is a collaborative research approach that equitably involves community members, researchers, and other stakeholders in the research process and recognizes the unique strengths that each bring. The aim of CBPR is to combine…
    January 2018
    Community-rooted/Participatory Research
  • Idealized versions of health care are common, and access to health care is often viewed as an unambiguous good. In the social determinants of health literature, for example, access to health care is treated as an intermediate determinant of health. This conceals a simplistic inference: the better your access to health care, the better your health. The reality is more complex: a modern industrial…
    January 2017
    Services & Programs, Social/Structural Determinants, Historical Trauma, Systemic Determinants
  • Significant progress has been made in maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH) in recent decades. Between 1990 and 2015, the global mortality rate for children under age five years dropped by 53 percent, from 90.6 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 42.5 in 2015 (Liu and others 2016). Maternal mortality is also on the decline globally.1 Despite progress, maternal, neonatal, and under-…
    April 2016
    Maternal/Child Health
  • The environmental and health consequences of climate change, which disproportionately affect low-income countries and poor people in high-income countries, profoundly affect human rights and social justice. Environmental consequences include increased temperature, excess precipitation in some areas and droughts in others, extreme weather events, and increased sea level. These consequences…
    November 2015
    Climate Change, Environmental Injustice
  • Intersectionality is a theoretical framework that posits that multiple social categories (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status) intersect at the micro level of individual experience to reflect multiple interlocking systems of privilege and oppression at the macro, social-structural level (e.g., racism, sexism, heterosexism). Public health’s commitment to social…
    June 2012
    Social Environment, Sexism
  • Racial scholars argue that racism produces rates of morbidity, mortality, and overall well-being that vary depending on socially assigned race. Eliminating racism is therefore central to achieving health equity, but this requires new paradigms that are responsive to structural racism's contemporary influence on health, health inequities, and research. Critical Race Theory is an emerging…
    April 2010
    Systemic Determinants, Racism
  • The biopsychosocial model is both a philosophy of clinical care and a practical clinical guide. Philosophically, it is a way of understanding how suffering, disease, and illness are affected by multiple levels of organization, from the societal to the molecular. At the practical level, it is a way of understanding the patient’s subjective experience as an essential contributor to accurate…
    November 2004
    Social/Structural Determinants
  • Despite the advances of modern epidemiology, the field remains limited in its ability to explain why certain outcomes occur and to generate the kind of findings that can be translated into programs or policies to improve health. Creating community partnerships such that community representatives participate in the definition of the research problem, interpretation of the data, and application of…
    May 2004
    Chronic Disease, Communicable Disease, Environmental/Community Health

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