September 2023: Healthy Behaviors

Posted on July 24, 2023 by Justin B. Moore

This entry is part 1 of 12 in the series September 2023

Associate Editor Dr. Justin B. Moore highlights articles appearing in the September 2023 issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice.

The September issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice contains a variety of articles illustrating the current scope of public health activities in the United States including pandemic preparedness, health equity, healthy eating, tobacco control, diabetes management, and COVID-19. The issue also has a number of interesting articles on a number of topics less frequently addressed in the journal such as community health promotion in Mexico, the use of a chatbot to educate mothers, and machine learning to correct self-report anthropometric measures.

If you’re not a “cover to cover” journal reader, a few articles should rise to the top of your summer reading list. The first is by Brownson and colleagues entitled, “Understanding Health Equity in Public Health Practice in the United States.” In this excellent article, Dr. Brownson and his co-authors present the findings of a mixed-methods study designed to understand the extent to which equity-focused work is occurring in public health departments. Their data suggest considerable room for enhancing health equity practices in the United States.

A second article worth a look is by Heran Mane and associates entitled, “Practical Guidance for the Development of Rosie, a Health Education Question-and-Answer Chatbot for New Mothers.” Ms. Mane and her team describe their project in which they worked for more than three years to engage community members to create Rosie, a free question-answering chatbot available for pregnant and new mothers of color. The results suggest high levels of interest in the chatbot and its potential to address disparities in access to pregnancy-related health information.

Finally, I recommend reading, “Diabetes Self-management Education and Support Completion Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results from Local Health Departments in North Carolina” by Huabin Luo. Dr. Luo and colleagues conducted a retrospective analysis of 2017-2021 diabetes self-management education and support data at two health departments in eastern North Carolina. They found that completion rates were very low but that the format which delivered the content through two 4-hour sessions had a higher completion rate than the four 2-hour sessions.

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About the Author

Justin B. Moore: Justin B. Moore, PhD, MS, FACSM is a Professor in the Department of Implementation Science in the Division of Public Health Sciences at the Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, NC, USA. He holds joint appointments in the departments of Family & Community Medicine and Epidemiology & Prevention. Dr. Moore also serves as the Director of the Implementation Science Affinity Group within the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at Wake Forest University. He conducts community-engaged research focused on the dissemination and implementation of evidence-based strategies for the promotion of healthy behaviors in underserved populations. He also conducts epidemiological research examining the determinants of health behaviors and related comorbidities across the lifespan. He serves as the Associate Editor of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice as an Associate Editor-in-Chief for the Translational Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine. He previously served at the chair of the editorial board of the American Journal of Public Health. Dr. Moore is an active member of the American Public Health Association (APHA) and the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). He was named a fellow in the ACSM in 2010 and was a founding member of the Physical Activity Section of the APHA. He later served as the chair of the Physical Activity Section and as the Section’s representative on the APHA Governing Council. In 2017, he was named a fellow in the National Cancer Institute supported Mentored Training for Dissemination and Implementation Research in Cancer program. He has served as a visiting scholar at Nanchang University, located in Nanchang, Jiangxi, China, and Wuhan University, in Wuhan, Hubei, China. As a result of his research, he and his colleagues have published more than 170 peer-reviewed articles, and he has received funding as principal investigator for his work from the National Institutes of Health, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the de Beaumont Foundation, among others.