Political divisions now exert growing control over public health systems and policy solutions that governments worldwide implement. The rising impact of political beliefs on healthcare choices, public health programs, and social behaviour has created a need for researchers to study how political divisions affect public health results. The Call for Papers on Polarisation and Health Policy is now open to researchers from different fields who will study how political and social divisions affect health governance, health equity and policy implementation in different countries.

The increasing political divide in healthcare creates obstacles for public health initiatives that include vaccination programs, pandemic response, reproductive health policies and health equity programs. The political system of a country determines how its people behave and how they view medical treatment and how their leaders make decisions based on factual information. Existing research has concentrated on Western regions which study only a few health conditions but researchers need to study more places and research fields.

The special issue of Social Science & Medicine on Health Policy in a Global Context seeks to expand understanding of how political and social polarisation shapes health policy development and implementation worldwide. The researchers and public health experts and policymakers and social scientists will use this issue to create new knowledge about how governance and health systems and political factors interact with each other.