Healthy aging plays a crucial role in a country’s economic growth. However, older adults face health challenges, resulting in financial pressure on a country’s healthcare systems, a situation worsened during the pandemic. Amidst these challenges, digital health, such as telehealth, mHealth, and eHealth, emerged to address limited healthcare resources during and following COVID-19. This paper critically analyzes the current landscape of digital health for later life in Canada and the initiatives promoting it. A critical narrative review of 38 sources, including peer-reviewed studies, policy documents, and grey literature, was conducted. Thematic analysis identified four domains: access and utilization, structural barriers, digital ageism, and policy responses. Digital health expanded access and continuity of care, but significant inequities persist, including limited digital literacy, affordability constraints, and uneven infrastructure. Digital ageism operates across individual, institutional, and technological levels. Addressing these challenges requires equity-centred policies, inclusive design, and system-level interventions to support healthy aging.

Marine plastic pollution continues to increase despite decades of international regulatory activity, raising questions about the effectiveness of existing global governance arrangements. Existing legal instruments were not specifically designed to address plastic pollution in the marine environment and only target certain aspects of marine pollution. Despite the need for a global, legally binding plastic treaty, the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) process to address plastic pollution reached a deadlock in August 2025, where delegates failed to achieve consensus on fundamental definitions and upstream plastic production control. This article explores the specific political and procedural factors that have prevented the reaching of an agreement. We argue that the deadlock in the INC negotiations reflects three deep structural barriers. In particular, the economic dependence of some states on fossil fuels, which has led them to oppose essential upstream measures aimed at diminishing plastic production; the consensus-based procedural rules of the negotiations empowered a small minority of states to block ambitious measures, effectively limiting the treaty’s potential; and unresolved debates regarding financial mechanisms and responsibilities widened the gap between high-consumption economies and developing nations. Improving legal instruments, procedural strategies, clear definitions of the scope of the treaty and the application of robust economic safeguards are necessary to overcome the deadlock. This perspective describes the evolution of international plastic governance, synthesises the reported outcomes of the INC process and discusses structural and political obstacles to a strong global treaty. It also examines possible pathways to overcome the current deadlock while emphasising the need for national and regional policies, such as single-use plastic bans, circular economy and regulation of the international trade of plastic waste.

For years, in response to demand from the field, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office of Public Health Law Services (OPHLS) has partnered with outside organizations, including Temple University’s Center for Public Health Law Research and ChangeLab Solutions, to operate the Legal Epidemiology Learning Cohort (Learning Cohort). This year-long opportunity offers training and mentorship to health department practitioners and others from public health-adjacent settings on the practical steps of legal epidemiology, which includes collecting, mapping, and evaluating legal texts. Participants work in transdisciplinary teams to design and carry out the foundational work for completing projects on research questions relevant to local public health challenges. Throughout 2023, ChangeLab Solutions and OPHLS coordinated training sessions and provided technical assistance to seven Learning Cohort teams across the country. This paper provides an overview of the Learning Cohort’s background, approach, and lessons learned. It also spotlights three recent Learning Cohort teams who describe the projects they completed and the benefits and challenges they found in learning foundational legal epidemiology methods for their public health work. Featured projects demonstrate how legal epidemiology can be used to examine topics like water safety, Tribal access to public health data, and the intersection of state and local law.

International policy efforts to systematise the consideration of health outcomes across social and economic policy – the ‘Health in All Policies’ (HiAP) approach – have faced practical, relational and political difficulties. Meanwhile, new economic policy agendas focused on ‘inclusive growth’ or ‘wellbeing’ may provide an alternative route to improving population health by acting on upstream determinants. This research uses a frame analysis of thirty social, economic and health policy documents, and semi-structured interviews with thirty-four policy actors, to explore conceptualisations of ‘health’ in two devolved policy bodies in the UK – Greater Manchester Combined Authority and the Scottish Government – with declared interests in these economic agendas. Interviews revealed that social and economic policy actors conceptualised ‘health’ narrowly as biomedical, physical illness, and as shorthand for ‘health policy’. Further, some of these participants expressed resentment about health policy, while interviewees across teams expressed scepticism about HiAP. In contrast, ‘wellbeing’ was widely conceptualised similarly to the social model of health, included mental health, and was supported as a plausible common cause. This research suggests that a clearer conceptual distinction between ‘healthcare’ and ‘wellbeing’ – representing the medical and social models of health respectively – may support policy efforts to promote population health.

Despite their substantial influence in the society, studies on the engagement of priests in suicide prevention in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is limited. We investigated Nigerian Catholic clergy’s preparedness, training needs and perceived responsibility regarding suicide prevention as well as their awareness of national suicide prevention policy. Participants were 323 Catholic priests drawn from eight Catholic dioceses in Southeast Nigeria. Self-report data was obtained using items from the Professional Suicide Knowledge and Skill Survey. We found that fewer priests reported prior suicide prevention training (26.3%), but many of them affirmed their duty to assist suicidal persons (75.2%), necessity of suicide prevention education (93.8%), need for additional suicide prevention skills training (92.9%), and willingness to learn more about suicide prevention (91.3%). While only 16.7% were aware of national suicide prevention policy, 98.1% of the priests endorsed the inclusion of priests in national suicide prevention initiatives. Suicide prevention training of priests and perceived need for further training were also associated with greater perceived responsibility for suicide prevention, awareness regarding suicide prevention policy and support for clergy involvement in suicide prevention initiatives. Implementing structured suicide prevention training may strengthen community detection and referral, especially in LMICs where faith leaders are highly accessible.

Coeliac disease (CD) is an autoimmune disease resulting in lifelong intolerance to gluten. Treatment of CD is a gluten-free diet (GFD). High gluten-free (GF) food costs contribute to GF-food insecurity (GF-FI) in households with children with CD. The study objective was to describe parental perceptions of the barriers/facilitators of GF-food security (GF-FS) and the health policies parents deem necessary to combat GF-FI. A subset analysis of a cross-sectional study examining household and child socio-demographic, child diet quality and GFD adherence, food environment, and GF-FI in parent–child dyads (n = 59) using validated questionnaires. Virtual interviews included 13 open-and-closed ended questions examining parent perceptions related to barriers/facilitators of GF-FS and health policies to address GF-FI. Questions were validated for face-and-content using an iterative process with parental responses deductively coded using the 5As of food insecurity theoretical framework. High GF-food costs (>90%) and the lack of effective GF-food specific health policies (∼94%) were the most commonly cited barriers to GF-FS, particularly in GF-FI households. Social media (>60%) was used to share information related to tax credits (15%) affordability, accessibility, and availability of GF-foods (75%). Parents deemed child tax credits (∼75%), development of food policies focused on education in schools (∼34%), dietary prescriptions (25%) and official recognition of CD as a disability (∼26%) as important to address GF-FI. In conclusion, parents perceive high GF-food costs and lack of effective GF-food health policies as important mediators of GF-FI. Social media platforms were widely used by the community to share information and solutions to address GF-FI.

The growing literature on populism and international security portrays populist governments as particularly prone to confrontational security politics. Yet whether populist rhetoric translates into substantive changes in security policy remains contested. We argue that populist governments exert uneven influence across different dimensions of security policy-making, with greater capacity to reshape the ideational and institutional dimensions than the geopolitical, operational, and material ones. To explain this variation, we develop a five-dimensional framework of security policy-making and apply it to Poland under the Law and Justice (PiS) government (2015–23). Drawing on official documents, secondary sources, and twenty-eight anonymised interviews with policymakers and security experts, we examine how populist discourse translated into policy change. We find that PiS successfully politicised security narratives, broadened threat perceptions, and intensified the domestic use of security discourse, while largely maintaining continuity in Poland’s strategic orientation. Major shifts in defence policy were driven primarily by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine rather than by PiS’s populist agenda. The Polish case demonstrates that the effects of populism vary systematically across different dimensions of security policy-making and are conditioned by geopolitical constraints, institutional resilience, alliance commitments, and external shocks. The article contributes to debates on populism and international security by specifying the conditions under which populist governments are – and are not – able to produce lasting security policy change.