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The United States takes a federalist approach to pandemic responses while the bulk of pandemic powers sits at the state level. Thus, comprehensive accounts of how state health officials managed the crisis and how the federal government affected those efforts are needed to better understand the governmental response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This article reports the results of semistructured interviews with 29 state-level policy actors from 16 US states. Interviewees discussed multiple aspects of the US federal COVID-19 response that affected the response in their states, including communications with the public, intergovernmental communications, and federal actions regarding various aspects of health service preparedness including emergency funding, procurement, testing capacity, vaccine development and distribution, and data systems. This research enriches the discussion about US pandemic preparedness and response, and indicates that alignment of public communications across government levels, enhanced intergovernmental communication, inclusion of rural perspectives, and federal investment in and sustainment of health service preparedness are key factors that can improve future US pandemic responses.
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“Caregiving Youth” and the Patchwork History of Recognition in the United States
This article examines the U.S. legislative and policy landscape and its historical and contemporary recognition of young people as caregivers and their importance to public health, both as care providers and as a category of special concern for overall wellbeing. Drawing on feminist geographies of health to situate a historical analysis, we aim to answer two key questions: First, what is the history of recognition of caregiving youth in key moments of federal action to address family caregiving needs? Second, how might we use this history to better understand and analyze the patchwork geography of caregiving youth recognition in the U.S. and other countries that similarly lack formal national policy recognition to improve and enhance public health? We use the term patchwork to describe how federal recognition of caregiving youth in broader debates about public health is uneven across both time and space, and contingent upon civil society, non-profit organizations, and researchers working in and with geographically bound communities. Our results illustrate how a focus on the relationships of recognition, both in the past and the present and at local and national scales, reveals a different perspective on caregiving youth in the U.S. with a much more complex history than previously identified. The article describes how relationships established in the absence of federal policy or legislation are sometimes directed towards building more formal recognition, and other times with the goal of changing practices in a specific location.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1853260
- PAR ID:
- 10520557
- Publisher / Repository:
- International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
- Volume:
- 20
- Issue:
- 20
- ISSN:
- 1660-4601
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 6920
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20206920
