On seizing opportunities to shape a healthier world in the new year.
In last week’s essay, I suggested four trends that likely will play an outsized role in health in the coming year: the need for new ideas in health, the rise of new approaches in how we engage with health and the forces that shape it, the creation of new systems that generate health, and the work of improving public health’s relevance. In that essay, I stressed that these trends and ideas long predated this moment, representing major shifts in our engagement with health. They are structural factors in what we do, currents that already are playing a significant role in health and how we work, collectively, to support it. The essay was, in a sense, countercultural to this moment in that it did not engage with the upcoming presidential transition. Certainly, the incoming Trump administration matters for health, but had Vice President Harris won the election, I still likely would have written much the same essay, in an effort to address these longstanding trends and issues in health. This aligns with the aspiration of these essays to, at times, pull back from the daily developments of politics and culture, the current events that shape the news cycle, to engage with what is driving events at the most fundamental level.
Having identified trends in last week’s essay, I would like today to discuss how we can tackle these trends in 2025. How do we challenge ourselves to intersect with emerging trends in the pursuit of a healthier world? It can feel, at times, like large-scale trends just happen to us, with little we can do to meaningfully affect them. However, I would like to suggest that we challenge ourselves to do more, that we can engage with trends to build a healthier world in 2025 and beyond. Toward this aspiration, I would like to suggest four challenges to health in this moment, inspired by four strategies that have guided our efforts at WashU as we have begun the work of building a great school of public health in St. Louis.
Read more here