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). ...

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

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

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to be felt across the United States, and this includes the ways in which we interact with the healthcare system. As the mother of a daughter with complex medical needs and a diabetic patient myself—what many would refer to as “super-users” of the medical system—we had to quickly adjust and adapt to the ways we’d need to manage our health conditions throughout the pandemic, as COVID has not stopped our need for ongoing care management. So, when I was asked to serve as faculty for the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the systemic limitations of the American health system when confronted with the unexpected emergence of major disease, and underserved communities are often those most affected. A possible solution to address these disparities: mobile clinics. Mobile clinics are vehicles customized with medical equipment and staffed with medical providers and other health ...

Americans die younger than people in other high-income countries. With a life expectancy of 78.5 years in 2018, Americans die 5.7 years younger than people in Japan, the global leader. They die 3.4 years younger than their northern neighbors in Canada. And they die 2.7 years younger than their

It’s a warm September day. I neatly arrange my voter registration materials at a small table outside of the Somerville Urgent Care entrance. Sitting on a cool granite bench, I watch as a young girl and her mother approach. They are linked arm-in-arm, speaking Portuguese. “Hello! Are you registered to vote?!” They can’t see it, but I’m smiling behind my mask. The young girl’s face lights up, and, like many who visited my table before her, she begins to share her story. In just five days, she’ll turn 18. She’s finally old enough to vote ...

Meet Anna. She’s a 47-year-old woman with diabetes and high blood pressure—that is, hypertension. When I first met Anna three years ago, she’d recently moved to Massachusetts and obtained health insurance for the first time in two decades. During her first clinic visit, Anna’s blood sugar was wildly uncontrolled—a clear indication of diabetes. She felt dizzy and fatigued, but this was her baseline. We spent over an hour, during a visit scheduled for 20 minutes, working with the pharmacist and health insurance company to find an insulin prescription for which she could ...

More than six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, child care solutions for families remain scarce. A high-stakes problem typically confined to parents with children younger than five, lack of child care has now become a near-universal challenge, with remote K-12 learning upending care infrastructure for families with school-aged children as well. Consistent failure to provide public funding to the child care and early education sector—both traditionally and in this moment of crisis—is taking a heavy toll: