Over the last five decades, the gap between the haves and have-nots has consistently increased in the realm of access to healthcare services among different sectors of society: from quality of healthcare services, access to health supplies, technologies, and usage of health information and health prevention services, to vulnerability to certain types of diseases and health outcomes. Against this backdrop this edited collection - the first of its kind - uses the framework of communication in order to understand the underlying dimensions of health disparities and the communicative processes, policies, methodologies, and messages that are deployed with the goal of increasing access, improving quality, and addressing the underlying causes.
Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients' and providers' attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.
In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
The Institute of Medicine's Roundtable on Population Health Improvement brings together individuals and organizations that represent different sectors in a dialogue about what is needed to improve population health. On September 22, 2014, the roundtable held a workshop to discuss some of the science of health communication, audiences, and messaging, and to explore what it will take to generate widespread awareness, acceptance, and action to improve health, including through the entertainment media, the news media, and social media. This report summarizes the presentations and discussion of the workshop.
This volume includes papers related to issues of technology, communication, health disparities and government options in health and health care services. It fills an existing gap by providing a clear sociological overview and focus on these topics.
Gaps in health care access and outcome betwen ethnic groups have presented long-term challenges to the health community. For health communicators the question is: what can the media do to help eliminate racial disparities in health care? This study answers that question from a perspective of agenda building. By effectively gaining media coverage on the issue of health disparities, or building the media agenda, public relations practitioners could hope to influence public percpetion of the issue and hence induce disparity-reducing behaviors. As to how to effectively build a media agenda on health disparities, this research proposed a model of agenda building. In-depth interviews with health care journalists and public relations practitioners around the U.S., as well as analysis of the media disparity content show initial support for the model: the effectiveness of agenda building is positively associated with how much public relations practitioners agree with journalists on news values and on ways to interpret health disparities. For those who are in the field doing health public relations or reporting on health disparities, the book will provide exciting new strategic directions for health campaigns. The agenda building approach offers public relations and journalism researchers a robust agenda for future studies.
How can we all work together to eliminate the avoidable injustices that plague our health care system and society? Health is determined by far more than a person's choices and behaviors. Social and political conditions, economic forces, physical environments, institutional policies, health care system features, social relationships, risk behaviors, and genetic predispositions all contribute to physical and mental well-being. In America and around the world, many of these factors are derived from a lingering history of unequal opportunities and unjust treatment for people of color and other vulnerable communities. But they aren't the only ones who suffer because of these disparities—everyone is impacted by the factors that degrade health for the least advantaged among us. In Why Are Health Disparities Everyone's Problem? Dr. Lisa Cooper shows how we can work together to eliminate the injustices that plague our health care system and society. The book follows Cooper's journey from her childhood in Liberia, West Africa, to her thirty-year career working first as a clinician and then as a health equity researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Drawing on her experiences, it explores how differences in communication and the quality of relationships affect health outcomes. Through her work as the founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, it details the actions and policies needed to reduce and eliminate the conditions that are harming us all. Cooper reveals with compelling detail how health disparities are crippling our health care system and society, driving up health care costs, leading to adverse health outcomes and ultimately an enormous burden of human suffering. Why Are Health Disparities Everyone's Problem? demonstrates the ways in which everyone's health is interconnected, both within communities and across the globe. Cooper calls for a new kind of herd immunity, when a sufficiently high proportion of people, across race and social class, become immune to harmful social conditions through "vaccination" with solidarity among groups and opportunities created by institutional and societal practices and policies. By acknowledging and acting upon that interconnectedness, she believes everyone can help to create a healthier world. Features • Raises readers' health care inequities literacy through an approachable narrative with specific examples • Introduces the concept of "herd immunity" as it applies to building communal awareness of systemic injustices • Features sections that underscore key takeaways • Includes contributions from the world's leading minds through their research findings and quotations • Guides readers on what can be done at an individual level as a patient, public health professional, and community member • Includes inspiring stories of effective health equity studies and practices around the world, from Ghana's ADHINCRA Project addressing hypertension control to Baltimore's BRIDGE Study for depression in African Americans and the Maryland and Pennsylvania–based RICH LIFE Project for hypertension, diabetes, and other medical conditions Johns Hopkins Wavelengths In classrooms, field stations, and laboratories in Baltimore and around the world, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professors of Johns Hopkins University are opening the boundaries of our understanding of many of the world's most complex challenges. The Johns Hopkins Wavelengths book series brings readers inside their stories, illustrating how their pioneering discoveries benefit people in their neighborhoods and across the globe in artificial intelligence, cancer research, food systems' environmental impacts, health equity, science diplomacy, and other critical arenas of study. Through these compelling narratives, their insights will spark conversations from dorm rooms to dining rooms to boardrooms.
The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication brings together the current body of scholarly work in health communication. With its expansive scope, it offers an introduction for those new to this area, summarizes work for those already learned in the area, and suggests avenues for future research on the relationships between communicative processes and health/health care delivery. This second edition of the Handbook has been organized to reflect the goals of health communication: understanding to make informed decisions and to promote formal and informal systems of care linked to health and well-being. It emphasizes work in such areas as barriers to disclosure in family conversations and medical interactions, access to popular media and advertising, and individual searches online for information and support to guide decisions and behaviors with health consequences. This edition also adds an overview of methods used in health communication and the unique challenges facing health communication researchers applying traditional methods to efforts to gain reliable and valid evidence about the role of communication for health. It introduces the promise of translational research being conducted by health communication researchers from multiple disciplines to form transdisciplinary theories and teams to increase the well-being of not only humans but the systems of care within their nations. Arguably the most comprehensive scholarly resource available for study in this area, the Routledge Handbook of Health Communication serves an invaluable role and reference for students, researchers, and scholars doing work in health communication.
This popular and engaging text on health communication is now revised and updated in a second edition that incorporates recent research and boasts new material on topics such as crisis communication, social disparities in health, and systemic reform. Fully revised second edition of this popular and authoritative text Includes fresh material on topics such as crisis communication, health care reform, global health issues, and political issues in health communication New case studies, examples, and updated glossary keep the work relevant and student-friendly Provides effective strategies for healthcare organizations and individuals in communicating with patients Updated and enhanced online resources, including PowerPoint slides, test bank, and instructors manual, available upon publication at www.wiley.com/go/wright
This book presents health communication scholarship from Chile, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden, United States, and Venezuela, that recognizes the central role of communication in addressing and coping with health disparities across diverse populations. It thus advances understanding of the nuances of long standing, as well as emerging health disparities in our ever-changing social environment. The volume features eleven original, interdisciplinary research and evidence-based articles from scholars with distinct disciplinary backgrounds and unique positionalities who offer new and meaningful perspectives for scholars and practitioners in their diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice efforts within domains such as health communication and public health. Contributions to the book facilitate meaningful dialogue and knowledge exchanges to address a wide range of key health disparities related to structural barriers and racial inequities. Featuring highly interdisciplinary research spanning from the Global South to the Global North, this book will be a key resource for researchers, scholars and practitioners in both communication studies and health sciences, as well as their respective allied fields such as media studies, telecommunications, journalism, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, medical science, nursing, public health, psychology/psychiatry, and medical informatics. It was originally published as a special issue of Health Communication.
