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HGHI’s Inaugural Global Health Symposium: April 12th, 2023

The Harvard Global Health Institute is thrilled to announce that registration is now open for virtual attendance to our Inaugural Global Health Symposium! While in person capacity is limited, we invite our longstanding global and Harvard-based community to join us virtually on April 12th, 2023 from 9:00am to 4:00pm ET for a series of conversations centered around the theme “Global Health Equity through Community Engagement.”

Allocating health outcomes to risk factors, part 3

By Austin Frakt A common way to assess how much various factors contribute to health is to estimate how much variation in health across the country is explained by each of those factors. But explaining variation is not as useful as many may think. This is the third and final post in a series on Nancy Krieger’s ‘s American [...]

Allocating health outcomes to risk factors, part 2

By Austin Frakt I wrote about Nancy Krieger’s insightful American Journal of Public Health paper in a previous post. In this second of three posts, I will continue to unpack some of the content of her article, focusing on the distinction between correlation and causation. Krieger’s paper is titled “Health Equity and the Fallacy of Treating Causes of Population [...]

Allocating health outcomes to risk factors, part 1

By Austin Frakt In 2017, Nancy Krieger, Professor of Social Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, published a truly insightful paper in the American Journal of Public Health in which she raised several conceptual problems with allocating health outcomes to contributions from risk factors. This is the first of three posts that will [...]

Next Phase for the Drivers of Health Project

By Austin Frakt The next public meeting of the Drivers of Health project will be held in Detroit on September 11. Housing, education, and access and quality of health care will be the focus. Why? This post explains. The first public meeting of the Drivers of Health project, held in Princeton, NJ on June 17, covered social [...]

Pediatric social determinants screening

By Austin Frakt In late June, Public Agenda published a report on perspectives of low-income parents on pediatric screening for social determinants of health. A key conclusion suggests a substantial challenge. One of the report’s conclusions is: The low-income parents in our focus groups understood their children were affected by the social determinants of health for which [...]

Social determinants of health in the news

By Austin Frakt Social determinants of health comes up frequently in health policy news. Here are quotes from six stories that caught my eye over the last few months. 1. Google’s life-extension spinoff teamed up with Ancestry to study 54 million family trees — and learned that a surprising factor helps determine how long we live, [...]

Do Early Childhood Programs Work?

By Kate Raphael There’s a lot of evidence that social determinants of health are especially important in the early years of life. Experiences, resources, and opportunities available during childhood can influence health in ways that persist through adulthood. For these reasons, it’s especially important to evaluate the effectiveness of Early Childhood Programs, those interventions targeted [...]

Doorway to Health: Investigating the Housing Effect

By Kate Raphael Housing significantly affects health. In our homes, we experience the intersection of many health-related factors, and when we spend so much time in this environment, the cumulative effects of where we live can have long-term health consequences. A growing body of literature documents many of these links between housing and health, but the [...]