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“My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as waterTends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.”Tulips, by Sylvia Plath

Come. Step into the door. Spin inward as if on a roundabout, while a couple cradling their newborn spin outward. This door delivers you into the atrium, behind a new widow who is looking for the bereavement office. One revolving door. A carousel of care. Cradle to grave.

As we approach January 2023, it seems apt to reflect on past learnings and plans for new beginnings. January is thought to derive from the Roman deity Janus, who represents both endings, transitions, and beginnings as well as doorways, thresholds, and gates. The god has two faces, one looking forwards and the other backwards. As The Lancet Respiratory Medicine enters the year of its 10th anniversary, we thought it appropriate to publish a Series on digital health—an area that has been growing ...

Sharing graphs during our interview that show higher rates of premature mortality in Black people than in all other racial and ethnic groups in New York City (NYC), Michelle Morse comments: “That to me is the ultimate example of how racism impacts health; Black people are dying young for no reason other than the net impact of racism.” Morse is the Deputy Commissioner for the Center for Health Equity and Community Wellness (CHECW) and inaugural Chief Medical Officer (CMO) at the NYC Departmen...

Nada Al-Nashif, who became UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2020, has had a long career in which she has focused on the mobilisation of knowledge for inclusive, just, and sustainable societies. Under her leadership, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is spearheading the Agenda Towards Transformative Change for Racial Justice and Equality, which provides a roadmap for making concrete positive changes in the lives of Africans and people of African descen...

Marie A Bernard was born in New York City and moved to Oklahoma City, USA, as a young child when her physician parents established a private practice there. “They were told that there were a lot of opportunities for Black doctors in Oklahoma”, she says. “It was segregated at that time, segregation that persisted in southern parts of the US for many years…I grew up in a segregated system until doors opened as I entered high school.” Following in her parents’ footsteps, Bernard studied...

Microbiologist Senjuti Saha is the Director of the non-profit Child Health Research Foundation (CHRF), in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and a strong advocate for equity in global health research. When she received a grant in 2018 to set up a sequencing facility at CHRF and got the non-governmental organisations first sequencing machine, she says, “I wanted to show the world that you could be anywhere in the world and be able to sequence. You don’t have to ship samples out to the US or UK. You can seque...

Margo Greenwood was born in Wetaskiwin, AB, Canada, to a Cree father and English mother, and was raised and educated in Ponoka, AB. Both places are located in Treaty 6 territory. Tragically, Greenwood lost both her parents, “in my mid-teens”, she recalls, “and so I was really on my own”. It was an experience that influenced the focus of her work. Greenwood is now Professor in the Education programme at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) in Prince George, BC, Canada. She i...

Yin Paradies, the Alfred Deakin Professor and Chair in Race Relations at Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia started his academic life studying applied mathematics and computing. His first job, at the Indigenous Health Statistics Unit of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, took him towards his work in heath inequalities, on racism as a determinant of Indigenous health in Australia, and his current focus on decolonisation and Indigenous knowledges and perspectives. Paradies, who is a Wa...

Delan Devakumar, Professor of Global Child Health and Co-Director of the Centre for the Health of Women, Children and Adolescents at University College London (UCL), UK, has always understood racism and what it is like to be discriminated against. About a year before he was born, his parents’ house in Sri Lanka was burnt down. “It was a targeted attack”, he says. “My father comes from the Tamil minority group.” Later, as a south Asian boy growing up in north Wales, UK, he experienced r...