Archive

As of June 30, 2025, Perspectives in Primary Care is no longer active. 
Perspectives in Primary Care features writing from practitioners, activists, and community members representing organizations, practices, and institutions across the United States and around the world.

Focusing Upstream: Imagining Post-COVID Times

As the daily death toll for COVID-19 continues to climb across the United States, it may be difficult to consider post-pandemic times. Yet despite the messy

Birth Equity Requires Hard Truths and New Leadership

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States is finally experiencing a cultural shift in consciousness and awareness of racial disparities. And meanwhile, the maternal health community’s reckoning with racism is accelerating. Black women in the United States die from pregnancy-related complications at

Training a Contact Tracing Workforce on Navajo Nation

COVID-19 reached the Navajo Nation in March 2020 and spread quickly, recording some of the highest rates in the country. Leveraging more than a decade ...

The Impact of Neighborhoods on Racial & Ethnic Inequities in COVID-19

As 2021 opens with US COVID-19 cases soaring, racial/ethnic inequities persisting, and

Why Harvard Medical School Could Be a Perfect Place to Train Family Medicine Physicians

In 1965, Harvard Medical School (HMS) had a thriving Family Medicine & Primary Care Residency—a visionary program that was strongly rooted in serving the vulnerable populations surrounding the HMS campus. Resident physicians trained to provide outpatient primary care across the life spectrum, working in partnership with Boston Children’s Hospital, Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, and Boston Lying-In Hospital (the latter two of which are Brigham & Women’s predecessor institutions). ...

A Model for Managing Outpatient COVID-19

On March 18, 2020, Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) opened its COVID-19 outpatient clinic (now referred to as the acute care clinic), with the goal to triage and provide care for patients with respiratory symptoms, ultimately reducing strain on our local emergency departments. CHA is an academic community healthcare system based in the Boston area and serves ...

Here’s Why Mental Healthcare Is So Unaffordable & How COVID-19 Might Help Change This

If you ask a patient to describe their experience finding a therapist or psychiatrist in the community, don’t be surprised if ‘expensive,’ ‘difficult,’ and ‘discouraging’ are some of the first words that come to mind. The decades-long separation of mental healthcare from physical health has left patients and clinicians alike with serious challenges navigating options for care. And the cost has been much more than just inconvenience—our poorly integrated system is responsible for

How Our Clinical Public Health Curriculum Equipped Us to Respond to COVID-19

The authors are fourth year medical students at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences who have been active participants in their medical school’s Clinical Public Health (CPH) curriculum. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the students applied their education to help launch and lead community response efforts, including creation of a

Incarceration is a Public Health Crisis, During COVID-19 and Beyond

The COVID-19 pandemic has made American inequality painfully clear. As case counts continue to rise across the country, some of the largest COVID-19 clusters in the US are in jails, prisons, and detention centers. As of November 2020, 38 different institutions have reported greater than 1,000 cases. One study estimates that rates of COVID-19 in US prisons are