A Novel International Partnership for Actionable Evidence on Urban Health in Latin America: LAC‐Urban Health and SALURBAL

Abstract

This article describes the origins and characteristics of an interdisciplinary multinational collaboration aimed at promoting and disseminating actionable evidence on the drivers of health in cities in Latin America and the Caribbean: The Network for Urban Health in Latin America and the Caribbean and the Wellcome Trust funded SALURBAL (Salud Urbana en América Latina, or Urban Health in Latin America) Project. Both initiatives have the goals of supporting urban policies that promote health and health equity in cities of the region while at the same time generating generalizable knowledge for urban areas across the globe. The processes, challenges, as well as the lessons learned to date in launching and implementing these collaborations, are described. By leveraging the unique features of the Latin American region (one of the most urbanized areas of the world with some of the most innovative urban policies), the aim is to produce generalizable knowledge about the links between urbanization, health, and environments and to identify effective ways to organize, design, and govern cities to improve health, reduce health inequalities, and maximize environmental sustainability in cities all over the world.

Inequalities in life expectancy in six large Latin American cities from the SALURBAL study: an ecological analysis

“…To our knowledge, no study has compared health inequalities in cities across a sample of several cities in Latin America. To address this gap, we used unique data compiled and harmonised by the Salud Urbana en America Latina (SALURBAL) study, a collaboration of 15 institutions in 11 countries in Latin America 9 . We aimed to examine inequalities and spatial patterns of life expectancy at birth in six large Latin American cities and the extent to which this in-city inequality is associated with the socioeconomic status of the populations residing in these areas.…”

Understanding the rise of cardiometabolic diseases in low- and middle-income countries

“…Other countries in the Latin American and Caribbean region have approved similar policies, such as Uruguay and Peru. 145,146 Efforts to regulate the obesogenic environment are closely linked with the urban health agenda in Latin America, 147,148 and also to include the redesign of urban space and to provide better infrastructure to increase active transportation, reduce car use, provide green areas and increase public safety to incentivize utilitarian and leisure-time physical activity. 149 Combating obesity requires integrated governmental and societal action to protect population health.…”

Current State of Diabetes Mellitus Prevalence, Awareness, Treatment, and Control in Latin America: Challenges and Innovative Solutions to Improve Health Outcomes Across the Continent

“…In addition, the growing prevalence of diabetes mellitus across LatAm and the complexity of the disease suggest opportunities to create or strengthen collaborations towards its prevention and early detection [141][142][143][144]. For example, multinational and multidisciplinary researchpublic health-health care policy-clinical care partnerships which already exist in formal or informal platforms may be well-positioned to evaluate the impact of nutrition, health insurance, housing, and other public policies [79,141,143,[145][146][147][148][149][150][151][152][153][154] on health outcomes and assess their potential translation into preventive strategies at the public health and clinical care levels. At the same time, the eventual implementation of such strategies will be strengthened by local governments' commitment to prioritize the prevention and treatment of NCDs, in this case, diabetes, as previously voiced by experts and advocates in the region [79,141,[155][156][157][158].…”