Background: Communities consist of interconnected sub-systems, such as schools, healthcare organizations, and businesses, each fulfilling specific functions that contribute to the overall well-being of the community. Effective community responses to crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, require collaboration across these sectors. However,…

Background: National school curriculum statements detail what it is important to learn and are highly context- and discipline-specific. The health and physical education (H&PE) learning areas have multiple learning purposes, and facilitating this in curriculum design is a significant and challenging task. Objective: There is little reporting…

This paper argues that vice-charging, the practice of charging other persons with epistemic vice, can itself be epistemically vicious. It identifies some potential vices of vice-charging and identifies knowledge of other people as a type of knowledge that is obstructed by epistemically vicious attributions of epistemic vice. The hazards of…

As schools across the country made decisions about how to safely reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Fall of 2020, Catholic schools reopened for in-person instruction more than surrounding public schools. This study analyzes published reopening plans from 136 Catholic schools in 18 different states to explore how schools reopened and how…

Background: Decisions related to the development and implementation of public health programmes or policies can benefit from more effective use of the best available knowledge. However, decision makers do not always feel sufficiently equipped or may lack the capacity to use evidence. This can lead them to overlook or set aside research results…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of health program implementors and research analysts across seven low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) alongside Boston-based collaborators convened to implement data-driven approaches for public health response. An intensive statistics and data science training short course was developed to ensure that…

Knowledge Translation Platforms (KTPs) have drawn attention as multidisciplinary institutional structures that broker evidence to policy and practice. University Research Centers (URCs) appear to serve as internal KTPs by fostering research collaboration as well as advocacy. This study's aim was to examine URCs within one American School of Public…

Objective: Health behavior research suggests that perceived social norms impact health decisions. This study aimed to (a) examine reasons for vaccine hesitancy among a sample of college students compared to a clinical sample (b) examine the accuracy of perceptions of others' receptivity and intention to seek out the COVID-19 vaccine, and (c)…

Background: In public health emergencies, evidence, intervention, decisions and translation proceed simultaneously, in greatly compressed timeframes, with knowledge and advice constantly in flux. Idealised approaches to evidence-based policy and practice are ill equipped to deal with the uncertainties arising in evolving situations of need. Key…

The use of robust research findings in public health policy has been strongly encouraged for bridging the evidence-policy gap. To assess and further promote evidence uptake, understanding how research evidence is being used by decision makers is very important. This systematic review examined primary studies exploring the use of research evidence…

The decision whether to reopen universities for in-person learning in late 2020 relied on ethical decision-making where the consequences were dire to the mission of the institution, health of the community, financial well-being of the institution and employees, and had political ramifications. The risks that universities faced worldwide included…

A revised way of thinking is essential for promoting harm reduction strategies and reducing the negative implications of injection drug use (IDU). Despite the growth of harm reduction approaches in the United States, there is limited guidance for designing and implementing multi-sector efforts that address the external determinants that promote…

We use data from the applications North Carolina public school districts and charter schools submitted for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) to investigate the sense that educational leaders made of the pandemic as it unfolded. LEAs understood the pandemic as a multifaceted problem. Nearly all applications addressed four…

STIs in youth in New Jersey is a growing concern. According to New Jersey' Public Health Data Resource (2020), the total number of STIs in youth from age 15-24 totals 19,698. The current STIs-related sex education programs vary widely in New Jersey in terms of scope, the accuracy of content, emphasis, and effectiveness (Thrive New Jersey…

There is continuing interest in using the best available research evidence to inform public health policy. However, all too often efforts to do so rely on mechanistic and unrealistic views of the process by which public policy is made. As a result, traditional dyadic knowledge translation (KT) approaches may not be particularly effective when…