Note from the Editor

Increasingly over the past decade and a half, public health scholars and practitioners have endeavored to involve communities in the planning and execution of programs and research conducted in those communities. Many of the people who read and write for JHCPU work these fields every day. In Part 1 of the present issue (Working with Communities), we venture into some particular communities, guided by people who work there.

We learn about a Tennessee program for low-income women’s prenatal care started by students and faculty at Meharry Medical College and Vanderbilt University over forty years ago that continues to this day (Elkins et al.) and about the efforts of Golden Valley Health Centers in California to formally assess the linguistic proficiency of bilingual staff members who serve as interpreters (Nunez de Jaimes et al.).

The research section of Part 1 opens with a paper about an interactive mobile tablet application for assessing risk of early childhood caries, called MySmile Buddy (Chinn et al.). A collaborative group of professionals developed and implemented MySmile Buddy; the authors got good results when they tested its utility for community health workers and its acceptability to low-income mothers in New York City. An intervention in Philadelphia is designed to improve the lives and trajectory of victims of interpersonal violence seen in city hospitals (Corbin et al.) Researchers assessed the frequency of post-traumatic stress disorder and a history of adverse childhood experiences among participants, finding them extremely widespread. This information will enable practitioners to tailor their violence-prevention initiatives to fit people with such profiles. Next, we learn from Ahlers-Schmidt et al. what their Spanish-speaking participants in Kansas reported finding most useful in health-related text messages, a form of communication that this community favors (perhaps due to limited access to e-mail). More than English-speakers, the respondents in this study wanted explanations of why certain vaccines were important, and shorthand definitions of medical terms, as well as reminders of appointments and related practicalities. The paper by Jiminez and colleagues on how parental health literacy affects early intervention with at-risk children in hospitals affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, is related. Gower and colleagues looked into why nearly half the low-income individuals referred for eye exam follow-ups over the course of two years failed to return, finding that transportation and inadequate reminders continue to impede care. This research took place at Physician’s Free Clinic (a specialty clinic) in Columbus, Ohio. Klein et al.’s research also took place in clinic settings in Ohio: these authors report on the successful implementation of a medical-legal partnership that connects families in need to legal aid through pediatrician visits.

The three long research papers in the Working with Communities section cover a broad spectrum: The first (Kiesler et al.) is an exploration of the social determinants of health of people working on the backstretch at horse-racing tracks, an old venue where the changing populations of the most needy workers in the U.S. have long put their bodies on the line in tough conditions for very little pay. Today, its denizens tend to be Latino. The Photovoice method is an especially inviting way for community members to work with professional researchers and we see it employed to good effect here. Next, we turn to a different perspective on health inequities: Close and colleagues held focus groups with African American participants in Florida exploring how aware people were of the sharp disparities in infant mortality between African Americans and Whites—in some counties in Florida, Black infant mortality is four times as high as White infant mortality—and discussing people’s ideas about the reasons for these disparities. Here, then, the tangible outcomes are in education, expression, and activation of community members on a critical public health problem. The Working with Communities section concludes with Martin, Howell, et al. on recruiting Latinas into a randomized control trial.

The specter of cancer loomed over the Industrial Age and continues to loom over us in the Information Age. Part 2 of this issue (Cancer) contributes...