Crystal Ying Chan, a research assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is exploring the use of lay health workers to address gaps in public care, including food insecurity, diabetes management, and mental health care, in Hong Kong's low-income communities. Chan's research has found that children growing up in subdivided flats in Hong Kong are more likely to experience food insecurity and nutrient deficiencies. She is also examining the role of lay health workers in addressing poverty, health disparities, and mental well-being. The community intervention model involves recruiting lay health workers from the community, providing them with training, and offering targeted, individualized support and advice to low-income families. Lay health workers, who are familiar with the needs of the community, can provide ad-hoc support and fetch over-the-counter medications. However, integrating investments in public health care with community-based social service networks and ensuring proper training and ongoing supervision for lay health workers pose challenges. Chan believes that a decentralized model, giving more power to nurses and dieticians to provide basic care plans for household-level conditions, could be effective. Despite institutional barriers and the crackdown on social workers after the 2019 protests, Chan remains hopeful that her research will contribute to community health care innovation in Hong Kong.
Helena Hansen, a psychiatrist and anthropologist, advocates for integrating U.S. structural competency with Latin American social medicine to reshape mental healthcare into a vehicle for social change and justice. Hansen argues that by integrating principles from social medicine, particularly those developed in Latin America, mental health care can transform into a powerful tool for addressing systemic health inequities. She emphasizes the potential for clinical collaboration with grassroots organizations and the importance of centering the experience of community health workers and those with lived experience. Hansen calls for collaboration between U.S. Structural Competency movements and Latin American social medicine traditions, highlighting the critique of the capitalist basis of biomedicine in Latin American social medicine and the potential for biomedical care to complement grassroots actions and movements [8f45095d].