The spring semester of 2020 revealed rapid changes to teaching and research conditions, as well as daily life, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside the global pandemic and the shifting of the epicentre of the pandemic to the United States, the country is in the midst of a racial movement focused on Black Lives Matter. The current social and public health situation is a confluence of multiple streams of issues and impacts on lives, individual experience, education, research and potential collective trauma.

While the importance of public health and health professions in the public eye has increased dramatically, the educational and training process for future professionals is fraught with unknowns during these multiple, overlapping societal-level issues. Public health and the health professions require a unique, interdisciplinary model for education across fields of study, as these areas prepare students for vastly different career paths and draw trainees from many academic backgrounds. These disciplines converge alongside the major issues of our time – the COVID-19 pandemic, social/racial injustices and Black Lives Matter protests, and climate change.

In particular, there is an urgent need for research in this space focused in public health and health professions education and training programmes. Not only is this a broad, interdisciplinary area essential to training in many disciplines and career trajectories, but also an essential concern for addressing the pandemic from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (public health, epidemiology, healthcare practitioners and similar). A greater depth of understanding of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in public health and health programmes presents dual challenges – (1) research on a changing landscape and (2) focusing on research topics deeply impacting the researchers.

Public health education during the pandemic

Teaching global health at the outset of the pandemic revealed a number of unfortunate ways in which classroom content truly came to life. The relevance of the global health course could not be denied during the spring 2020 semester (Yoho et al., 2020). In reflecting on this work and developing a set of recommendations for best practices in teaching and learning for global health instruction and the public health education community, we emphasize reflective practice and adaptive teaching and learning strategies (Yoho et al., 2020).