Power: The most fundamental cause of health inequity?

In the wake of the waves of women speaking out about sexual harassment; gerrymandering rising to the level of a US Supreme Court case; inaction on gun control in the face of multiple mass shootings; and the riots around the removal of Civil War-era confederate monuments, there is an awareness that these events have affected the health and well-being of our communities. Public health professionals have recognized the effects of these events, and there have been impressive efforts to mobilize, such as Public Health Awakened, a group of public health professionals organizing for health, equity, and justice. Yet more work is needed to effectively build and accelerate these types of movements in the public health field, including rethinking how we define our professional scope and the way we practice. How do we justify taking public health actions to address these current events, and how do we determine their ties to population health or health equity? Topics such as gerrymandering and the #MeToo movement do not currently fall neatly within our dominant frameworks for the social determinants of health, our logic models for public health research, or our community health indicators. This makes us wonder whether there might be something missing—something upstream of the upstream factors that we now know influence health, something that we need to explore to broaden our definition of what matters to health. And more importantly, what drives health equity. (author introduction) #P4HEwebinarNovember2023