A New Journal for a New Era

For more than half a century, the International Journal of Health Services has played an important role in advancing health equity among public health journals. Since the publication of the first issue in 1971, and thanks to the strong leadership and drive of the journal's founding editor, Vicente Navarro, the journal has made a unique effort to understand and tackle global health inequities. The International Journal of Health Services (IJHS) has been sharp, bold, and solution-oriented, uncovering the root causes of social inequalities in health while proposing new social and health policies toward their elimination.

We live in times of existential threats to the human species. Global developments of the last decades, such as the reported drop in life expectancy before and after COVID-19 in many rich countries; the multiple ravages generated by global warming, other environmental crises, and many wars, mostly in low-income countries; persistent poverty and ever-increasing social inequalities; and public health crises such as COVID-19 and “new pandemics” such as obesity, metabolic syndrome, and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, among others, have increased health inequities at the local, national, and global levels. There is an urgent need to respond to this new reality. These global health problems neither exist naturally nor are due to biomedical causes or risk factors; they are made by institutional and economic arrangements, political actions, and cultural contexts. Furthermore, decades of increasing social inequalities under the growth of the financialization of the economy, the concentration of private economic power and neoliberalism, the implementation of structural adjustment programs and austerity policies, the global expansion of precarious employment, and growing political and ideological authoritarianism are turning the goal of achieving health for all into an increasingly elusive need. For example, the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report states that our societies must change immediately to avoid disaster and collapse. ¹ All these calamities have worsened recently with the still little-known deep impact of new pandemics such as that of COVID-19 and the atrocities generated by wars like those in Ukraine, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Darfur and others much less visible. This global context calls for critical and pioneering research in health inequalities and their political and policy solutions.

We are delighted and honored to take on the role of co-editors-in-chief of the IJHS. Our goal is to follow the journal's original vision while providing a new impetus, introducing changes that will allow the journal to continue analyzing the above developments globally and systemically, at the intersection of class, race, gender, nationality, and other inequality-producing social relations. In doing so, we aim to not only analyze problems, but to propose solutions that will improve the health of populations in this new historical era of the Anthropocene. Next year will mark 15 years since the landmark publication of the World Health Organization Report on the Commission on Social Determinants of Health. This will coincide with the change of the title of this journal, the International Journal of Health Services, which will become the International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services in January 2023. Celebrating these events, a new section of the journal will be devoted to “State-of-the-Art and Future Directions of the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH),” advancing this transdisciplinary approach to population health and equity that has blossomed during the last decades of the 20th century and the first three decades of the 21st. Specifically, contributions will address how the SDOH have been able to and can further contribute to describing, explaining, and eliminating health inequities—that is, unfair and avoidable social inequalities in health rooted in relations associated to class, gender, ethnicity/race, sexuality, migration status, and territory. We are looking for papers that can further develop SDOH into a transdisciplinary field of research, incorporating systemic analysis, policy analysis and proposals, and evaluation to develop our understanding of inequities in health, quality of life, and well-being and work toward their elimination. Editorials, commentaries, and theoretical and empirical contributions will be considered for publication (maximum length 5000 words). ¹ All invited submissions should be sent to the email addresses of the editors-in-chief below. Please include in your cover letter that you wish the article to be considered for “State-of-the-Art and Future Directions of the Social Determinants of Health.”

With this editorial note, we not only would like to announce the first changes that we plan to introduce in the journal, but also to acknowledge the efforts of the hundreds of authors who, over more than half a century, have contributed to making the journal an essential academic and public health advocacy reference, and to motivate and encourage old and young academics as well as policymakers and social activists, in particular those whose voices have been marginalized in the Global South, to contribute their efforts to improving public health and health equity. Our difficult times, more than ever, require deeper analyzes of how inequities are generated as well as the proposal of effective policy solutions. After all, health inequities are not only a pressing global scientific and political issue, but as the Indian feminist, environmental activist, and scholar Vandana Shiva points out, “they provide one of the best available sources of evidence to describe and explain how well-being and justice are unequally distributed globally”. ²