Today, the U.S. Surgeon General has taken a strong step to help support the mental health and well-being of American workers by releasing a comprehensive website that outlines the five essentials that employers can focus on to help create workplaces that are “engines of well-being.” The robust website points to both the Work and Well-Being Initiative employer toolkit as well as the Work, Family & Health Network STAR toolkit from…
India Policy Insights announces the first-ever interactive policy dashboard for India’s 543 Parliamentary Constituencies
India Policy Insights (IPI), the flagship project of the Geographic Insights Lab at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, has developed a first-ever interactive policy dashboard for India’s 543 Parliamentary Constituencies (PCs). This public interactive tool provides health, nutrition, and development data that specifically aligns with the political units represented by India’s democratically elected Members of Parliament (MPs), who are responsible for overseeing effective policy implementation for their…
Antiretroviral therapy (and resulting increased viral suppression) linked to longer AND healthier lives for older adults in South Africa
Researchers affiliated with the HAALSI study, including former Harvard Bell Fellows Collin Payne, PhD, and Lindsay Kobayashi, PhD, and faculty member Jennifer Manne-Goehler, PhD, are among the authors of a study published in The Lancet HIV that links increased viral suppression at the population level with not only increased life expectancy, but also with less disability, pointing to the value of ART to foster healthy aging. Learn more in this…
Labor Day op-ed in The Nation explains why “investments in better jobs today mean better retirements tomorrow”
Co-editors Beth Truesdale and Lisa Berkman penned an op-ed in honor of Labor Day that shares insights from their new book (that drops tomorrow!), “Overtime: America’s Aging Workforce and the Future of Working Longer.”
New policy brief series by India Policy Insights team delivers concise analysis of key performance indictors for five national programs sponsored by Indian government
The government of India has invested in programmes to help the states and districts achieve performance goals set to address everything from health issues (such as reducing anemia, stunting and low birth weight) to issues around gender inequity and women’s empowerment through education. But how can it be determined if India’s districts are achieving these goals? Now, a new policy brief series produced by India Policy Insight‘s team helps shed…
Three cheers for transformative potential of randomized controlled trials and natural experiments to help us better understand how social exposures impact health!
In honor of the American Journal of Public Health’s 100th anniversary, a commentary by HCPDS Director Lisa Berkman, faculty member Mauricio Avendano, and former Bell Fellow Emilie Courtin spreads enthusiasm about how the implementation of social randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and natural experiments that utilize observational data can help to advance the field of social epidemiology, and to illustrate… “…how credible social policy reforms may be instrumental to address health…
Op-ed introduces conceptual framework to better understand how “intersectional stigma” affects HIV prevention and care outcomes among sexual minority men in sub-Saharan Africa
Yerby Fellow Adedotun Ogunbajo, PhD, HCPDS faculty members Kenneth H. Mayer, MD, and Alexander C. Tsai, MD, PhD, and their colleague Phyllis J. Kanki, ScD, have published an editorial in the American Journal of Public Health that puts forth a framework that illustrates and dissects the “interconnected systems of stigma” that are likely serving as impediments to receiving quality HIV health services for sexual minority men (SSM) in sub-Saharan Africa.…
What can be done to better support incoming refugees in the United States?
Our Harvard Bell Fellow A. Nicole Kreisberg‘s HCPDS Working Papers (Vol. 21, No. 7) was published in the journal Social Problems, and was discussed in this Scholars Strategy Network’s No Jargon podcast on how refugees coming into the U.S. can be better supported.
Can India’s Health Information Management System (HMIS) data be relied upon for estimates of population-level birth and child mortality rates?
This study is one of the first to compare facility-based, administrative health data on births and child deaths to birth and death vital statistics from the more commonly relied upon nationally representative surveys, such as the Sample Registration System and the National Family Health System, at national and state levels over a four-year period. Although the study authors (including Pritha Chatterjee, Harvard Bell Fellow Aashish Gupta, and HCPDS faculty member…
A closer look at the impact of social networks on well-being among an aging South African population
A recent study based on data from the project “Health and Aging in Africa: a Longitudinal Study of an INDEPTH Community in South Africa” (HAALSI) suggests that social capital theory (the concept that the higher socioeconomic status of your contacts can have positive health impacts as they are a type of interpersonal resource) applies not only in higher-income settings, but in a more resource-limited, rural setting in South Africa as…