It is with a heavy heart that I write this last piece for Perspectives in Primary Care. Current financial realities have necessitated a strategic restructuring at our publisher, the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care. While many aspects of the Center’s important work were realigned into other programs, this was not possible for Perspectives, making this the final writing we will publish. The Perspectives in Primary Care website will be active through November 11, 2025, and thereafter will be available only through internet archives including Harvard Medical School’s Countway Library Institutional Archives (a direct link to the Perspectives archive will be available here).
In this difficult moment, I turn back to my first letter to our readers published just a year and a half ago. At that time, I wrote about our ongoing commitment to publishing works that utilize narrative medicine to promote health equity, highlighting innovation and learning through stories told by diverse voices. I promised to use Perspectives to hold space for sharing knowledge, experiences, and ideas to further primary care transformation, support health professionals’ well-being and resilience, and redefine value in primary care – while at all times keeping our patients’ lived experiences at the center. Primary care is embattled at many levels including financial strain, workforce shortages, and increasing demands on practitioners who often have fewer resources at hand to address them. Efforts like Perspectives are important to “shine light on topics that may otherwise remain unseen or misunderstood” – our Vision Statement, which remained constant and to which I believe we stayed true throughout our various chapters as a publication.
I am proud of the work that we have done with our small, mostly volunteer team. Articles in our recently-published inaugural special series focused on obesity were read more than 3,200 times within just two months of publication. In the past three months, Perspectives articles were viewed nearly 21,900 times, pointing to the ongoing relevance of much of our older content. Since its inception as the Harvard Medical School Primary Care Review in 2020 through the re-visioning as Perspectives in Primary Care in 2023 up to this final moment in 2025, we have published in excess of 240 articles by more than 220 authors, which have been viewed over 416,000 times by readers in 188 countries – nearly the entire world. Our writers contributed valuable insights, reference articles, advocacy pieces, and stories, and our readership and impact continued to grow.
I am grateful to the incredible Editorial Board of Perspectives in Primary Care: to our Associate Editors and Scholarship Specialists who worked so hard to bring our articles to their final polished state; to our Editorial Advisory Board for their guidance, expertise, and innovative ideas; and to our Managing Editor, Katie Cavender, who kept the endeavor afloat with great skill and good humor. It has been a true pleasure and my great privilege to work with each of you.
And I am grateful to all our readers around the world, who I hope have been educated, challenged, and most of all inspired by what they have read in Perspectives in Primary Care. I wish each of you the best in your work and strength in the fight to keep primary care alive in the face of a challenging and rapidly changing world.
In solidarity,
Zoe Agoos, MD
Editor-in-Chief, Perspectives in Primary Care
2023 - 2025
Zoe Agoos, MD, served as the Editor-in-Chief of Perspectives in Primary Care, published by Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care. She has a background in anthropology and public health and is a full-time family medicine physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance’s Everett Care Center.
**Feature photo obtained with a standard license on Shutterstock.