Political Will: A Bridge Between Public Health Knowledge and Action

Public health research: between science and action?

In this text, we first propose a concept of public health research as a multidisciplinary endeavor whose aim is to identify the main determinants of people's health status, analyzed at the collective level. The public's health is thus envisioned as a socially determined reality, in which risk factors include biological phenomena as well as a given community's social and economic environment. Se...

How Political Science Can Contribute to Public Health: A Response to Gagnon and Colleagues

From knowledge to action and back again: Building a bridge

Political violence and public health in Haiti.

In 1991, a violent military coup unseated Haiti’s first democratically elected government. An estimated 5000 people died, and hundreds of thousands more were displaced during the three years when military and paramilitary groups ruled the country. It was my privilege and responsibility to help provide basic medical services in central Haiti during those years. After constitutional rule was rest...

Political will for better health, a bottom-up process.

Lately, different voices in the global public health community have drawn attention to the interaction between the State and civil society in the context of reducing health inequities. A rights-based approach empowers people not only to claim their rights but also to demand accountability from the State. Lessons from history show that economic growth does not automatically have positive implica...