Continuously published since 1923, The Milbank Quarterly is a multidisciplinary journal of population health and health policy. It presents original research, synthesis, policy analysis, and commentary from leading thinkers, policymakers, and practitioners. The Quarterly’s goal is to publish scholarly papers that illuminate and add new insights to our understanding of important policy issues involving health and health care. Our audience includes the academic community, researchers working in all types of settings, and decision makers in both the public and private sectors.
The in-depth, multidisciplinary approach of the journal permits contributors to explore fully the social origins of health in our society and to examine in detail the implications of different health policies. Contributions come from many disciplines, including epidemiology, medicine, bioethics, law, history, and the full array of social science disciplines and health services professions. Manuscripts for the Quarterly should seek to communicate beyond the author’s home discipline. They may have a point of view, but it is essential that evidence be presented fairly and accurately, with difficult dimensions identified and not glossed over.
Topics addressed in the Quarterly include but are not limited to the impact of social factors on health, disease prevention, allocation of health resources, legal and ethical issues in health policy, health care management, historical analysis of health policies, and the organization and financing of health care. We welcome, in particular, manuscripts that address the intersection between health and various sectors of public policy (eg, education, housing, environment, criminal justice), that propose new ideas and frameworks for improving health and health care at the state level and that test and evaluate new approaches and strategies for financing, organizing, and delivering services to various populations, and that provide lessons for the US health care system drawn from the experiences of other nations’ health care systems.