The 2022 Global Health Practitioner Conference, hosted by CORE Group, took place in-person from October 3-5, 2022. In celebration of its 25th anniversary, this year’s theme for the conference was “Transforming the Global Health Landscape.” Conference presentation topics touched on increasing knowledge of multi-sectoral community health and highlighting best practices in Covid-19 pandemic response.  The conference brought together community health experts to participate in knowledge sharing and skills building sessions, and attendees learned about recent evidence across sectors and technical areas and contributed to discussions on community health.

USAID Advancing Nutrition co-presented a 90 minute interactive session titled Barriers to Good Nutrition: Mental Health, Feeding Difficulties, and Unhealthy Diets, alongside researchers at the Columbia University Teachers College, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and the Helen Keller International’s Assessment and Research on Child Feeding (ARCH) project. This multifaceted session presented insights from and linked the three different topics that present barriers to good nutrition–mental health, feeding difficulties, and unhealthy diets. Technical Advisor Alyssa Klein, Project Officer Malia Uyehara, and Social and Behavior Change Specialist Neha Jhaveri shared findings from their scoping review related to nutritional care of children with disability and non-disability related feeding difficulties, and discussed the process for developing a digital, open access Feeding and Disability Resource Bank. Participants were introduced to a state-of-the-art evidence and gap map of research linking food security and nutrition to mental health, and to  findings from research on young child consumption of unhealthy foods and beverages in peri-urban Senegal. During the session, participants joined one of three breakout groups moderated by the panelists to discuss opportunities for research, programming, and policy at the intersection of two of these critical fields.