Preparing the Urban Public Health Workforce

Oxford University Press;2021 Hardcover: 361 pp;$38.50 ISBN-10: 0190885300 ISBN-13: 978-0190885304 rban Public Health: A Research Toolkit for Practice and Impact seeks to prepare public health and other professionals to understand, measure, and change urban settings to improve the well-being of people living in cities and shrink the wide gaps in health that now characterize most cities. Edited by Gina S. Lovasi, Ana V. Diez-Roux, and Jennifer Kolker, three leaders at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University, and including 51 authors, of whom 11 are based outside the United States, the book provides essential lessons for health professionals who work in cities. Three main sections discuss core competencies for urban health professionals: identifying and collecting data for urban health research, choosing appropriate tools for working with urban health data, and selecting strategies to convert evidence into action to improve health. Both implementation science and, as Green has suggested, system science can be used to generate practice-based evidence,9 an approach that could enable researchers and policymakers to better learn from the public health policy and programmatic successes and failures that occur in cities every day.10 Urban health researchers have long grappled with the questions of scale.11 How can we bring interventions to the level where they have a meaningful impact on population health?