Health equity is nowadays recognised as an integral part of medicine and is a subject that we increasingly publish on at Nature Medicine. It was therefore a great pleasure for me to organise and chair a 3-hour Nature Café last week on Advancing Health Equity through Community Engagement.

With sponsorship provided by Takeda, a distinguished panel of experts covered various aspects of health equity and community engagement strategies, including how to build trust with disadvantaged and under-served communities, use of health data and digital engagement tools, and grassroots engagement through primary care.

Talks were from Folakemi Odedina, Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center in Florida, Andy Pattison, team lead for digital channels at the World Health Organization, Amitava Banjeree, Professor of Clinical Data Science at University College London, Marcia Castro, Andelot Professor of Demography at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and Rafaela Alves Pacheco, a primary care physician at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil.

The talks were followed by a panel discussion where we had excellent questions from the audience. We debated the role of politics and policymakers in furthering (or hindering) health equity, how trust can be built and lost, the role of diversity, equity and inclusion, and what publishers and funders can do to advance health equity (an important and useful question for me!)

You can now watch the 3-hour session (or as much or little as you wish) on-demand, and for free, here.