Doctors Transform How They Practice Medicine

The United States has rising childhood obesity and schools deal with kids who are picky. Through innovative school gardens and kid taste testing food, entrepreneurs across the nation are getting children to eat vegetables at school and love it.

In Uruguay, illegality and stigma surrounding abortions resulted in problems with maternal mortality rates. Utilizing a unique solution, a medical protocol was created to provide initial information and followup care to women seeking abortions.

Prescription drug mointoring programs provide a doctor with information about a patient’s prescriptions and—in some states—drug-related hospitalizations and arrests. With this tool, doctors are better able to identify drug-seeking behavior and intervene with at risk patients.

A community organization in Indiana called Cultivate "rescues" food from local caterers, hospitals, casinos, and businesses to then be packaged into take-home meals for students at Woodland Elementary School that come from food-insecure homes. Cultivate is in its second year of existence, has three staff and 400 volunteers, and hopes to expand beyond their pilot program to reach all 21 schools in the district.

Clarke County School District in Georgia has 21 public schools that all offer free meals to students, regardless of their financial needs. This is facilitated through a federally-funded program, so even though poverty rates are high in the area, local residents are not footing the bill. While there are still some challenges implementing the program, in general it is received well and allows students to focus on their work and well-being instead of being distracted by hunger.

The United Kingdom's health-care system – which has been lauded as one of the most equitable models for care – is built around a government agency that decides "which treatments are worth covering, and for whom." Although the measures used to determine these recommendations are controversial and the agency doesn't always sustain public trust in their decisions, the overall outcome has increased both social solidarity and life expectancy.

The Women’s Collective is a nonprofit that works with more than 10,000 subsistence farmers in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to promote food security using millets, a crop resilient to drought and climate change. For Pavitra, one of those farmers, she began cultivating the ancient grains in 2015 and now has more than enough food to feed her family year-round. However, there’s a lack of public investment in millet production and machinery. And there’s no unified effort to create demand for millets: Some state governments lead the charge and in other states, it’s led by grassroots organizations.

The Ajo Center for Sustainable Agriculture has helped the town of Ajo in Arizona distribute affordable and nutrient-dense food to the community after the coronavirus pandemic created a significant financial strain on many families. Additional support has come from the town's participation in the Environmental Protection Agency's program Local Food, Local Places which "provides technical support and expertise to help towns leverage food systems to boost economic development."

Drug Aid Africa sources unused, unaltered drugs from people who don’t need them anymore and distributes them to people who do need them but can’t afford or access them. Drug Aid Africa provides free routine medications for conditions like sickle-cell anemia, as well as antimalarials, antibiotics and frequent visits to communities where they provide healthcare support and supplies. So far, the organization's efforts have helped more than 10,000 people.

A pair of doctors are working to make healthcare more accessible and affordable by training area hospitals to use new technology, like ultrasound devices, to detect non-communicable diseases. Through their newly established non-communicable disease clinic staffed with personnel trained to provide more precise medical care, about 1,100 patients have been cared for.