{"doi":"10.18278/jep.1.3.2","title":"Equity for Older Adults and Those in Congregate Sites: Lessons from the First Year of a Local Public Health COVID-19 Response","abstract":"This paper presents lessons on the equity of healthcare and health for older people that emerged from the experience of a COVID-19 incident commander during the pandemic. The lessons include the value of ongoing investment in trustworthy cross-sector relationships and value-added roles for learners; the importance of working together for the common good which can provide a deep well to draw upon during a crisis; in such times, the vulnerable often become more vulnerable and need extra attention thus meeting the needs of older people requires consideration of age, disability, and congregate living status; an equity lens and cultural humility foster new opportunities for community health and systems thinking, and when balanced with on-the-ground work and relationships, make it possible to take on seemingly intractable problems; in order to advance community health and equity, it is vital to meet both immediate needs and to focus on strategic efforts to simultaneously transform systems and structures; developing new knowledge creates opportunities for broader sharing; interprofessional teams enable collective action in a complex problem; transparency and continuous communication are important always, but vital in a crisis; and proactive investment in public health infrastructure could mitigate a future crisis. While the pandemic produced loss and pain for millions, the transportable lessons about investing in system science, equity-focused, cross-sector infrastructure, and relationships can inform the future of public health and health care policy, grounded in lived experience, to inform the re-emergence of collective efforts to foster health equity for older people and other vulnerable populations.","journal":"Journal of Elder Policy","year":2021,"id":212357,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.952,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":803081,"name":"Charles Kent Smith","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":803082,"name":"Patricia Hughes Moore","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":802657,"name":"Heidi Gullett","orcid":"0000-0002-3984-517X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":49,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:52:27.434608Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}