Why We Started This Week in Public Health

by Jon Scaccia July 3, 2024

Hi there!

I’m here to share the story of why we started This Week in Public Health. For the past 15 or so years, I’ve been a community psychologist involved in various community health settings, where I’ve seen firsthand the importance of fostering health and wellness on a large scale. Let me explain how this journey led to the creation of our initiative.

About Public Health Research

Public health research is all about improving the health and happiness of entire communities. It focuses on studying health issues that affect large groups of people, rather than just individuals. This research spans many areas, including preventing diseases, promoting health, and ensuring everyone has access to quality healthcare.

Public health experts use data to identify health trends, understand risks, and create plans that help everyone live healthier lives. Their work supports policies and programs aimed at preventing diseases, encouraging healthy choices, and providing equal healthcare opportunities.

Bridging the Research-Application Divide

While public health research is crucial, it often takes about 17 years for discoveries to be applied in real life, with only 14% of findings reaching those who need them most. This delay impacts everyone, from students to healthcare providers and patients, missing out on new treatments.

Early in my community psychology career, I encountered the research-practice gap and learned about implementation science, which aims to bridge this gap by bringing evidence-based practices into real-world settings. A major hurdle is the complexity and inaccessibility of scientific papers.

Through my work in community settings, I discovered the power of qualitative data and natural language processing (NLP), a set of AI tools that analyze and simplify complex information. This inspired me to apply NLP to scientific publications to make them more organized, summarized, and accessible.

Our Mission

At This Week in Public Health we aim to make every encounter with science exciting and inspiring. With constant new research, it can be tough to stay current. We simplify and highlight important studies for you, turning complex information into engaging and inspiring insights. We’re here to make your journey through science enlightening and continuously captivating.

Making Science Accessible

Our goal at This Week in Public Health is to close this gap by offering free, easy-to-understand updates, making you a knowledgeable member of the health community. We want to make the latest public health research easy to access and ready to use right away. By doing this, we hope to reduce the research-practice gap and help people become better consumers of science.

Thank you for joining us on this journey to make public health research more accessible and impactful. Together, we can bridge the gap and bring vital scientific knowledge to everyone. If you haven’t, sign up below!