Despite the many Public Health successes over the last century, health disparity continues to exist in in American society. This introductory text addresses this topic head on, exploring steps that must be taken to prepare for the rapidly changing demographics in American society, including immigration reform (emerging majorities), and evidenced based information substantiating the fact that diversity matters in terms of the provision of health care.
The second Edition of this forward-thinking text goes beyond the discussion of health disparities to highlight the importance of health equity. As the title suggests, Health Equity, Diversity and Inclusion: Contexts, Controversies, and Solutions helps the reader understand key social justice issues relevant to health disparities and/or health equity, taking the reader from the classroom to the real world to implement new solutions. The new Second Edition features: • Two new chapters: one on the impact of urban education on urban health and another covering the elderly and health equity •Updated and enhanced coverage on men’s health, demographic data, the importance of cultural proficiency, maternal mortality and Black women, and much more. • Current trends and movements, including the role of social media in the provision of health care information for improved health literacy; mass incarceration and criminal justice reform; and much more.
"Despite the many public health successes over the last century, health disparity continues to exist in American society. Health disparities, diversity, and inclusion : context, controversies, and solutions is an incisive examination of this important topic. The book carefully explores steps that must be taken to prepare for the rapidly changing demographics in American society, including immigration reform, emerging majorities, and evidence-based information substantiating the fact that diversity matters in terms of the provision of health care."--Page 4 de la couverture.
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.
No other hospital department cares for patients as diverse as those who come to the Emergency Department (ED). These patients encompass all stages and positions of life and health. Many belong to distinct minority cultures defined by the patient's sexual orientation and gender identity, disability, spirituality, language, race, and ethnicity. It has been well documented that minorities experience inadequate emergency treatment and face poorer healthcare outcomes. Furthermore, research has established that the elderly, ethnic minorities, the poor, and persons with Medicaid coverage are more likely than other people to utilize the emergency department rather than primary care services. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act, particularly the Medicaid expansion, EDs across the United States are poised to care for an unprecedented number of underserved minorities. The need to equip emergency healthcare professionals to practice medicine that is culturally competent in the broadest possible sense has never been greater. Diversity and Inclusion in Quality Patient Care aims to fill this need.
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.
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.
This new edition focuses on bias in health care and provides a variety of case examples related to the timely topics of unconscious bias and microaggressions encountered by patients, students, attending and resident physicians, nurses, staff, and advanced practice providers in various healthcare settings. The proliferation of literature on unconscious bias and microaggressions has raised public awareness around these concerns. This case compendium discusses strategies and addresses professional responses to bias in health care and extends beyond the individual patient and healthcare provider into the communities where biased assumptions and attitudes exist. Recognizing that ethnic minorities, the elderly, the poor, and persons with Medicaid coverage utilize the emergency department at higher rates than the general population, this compendium also builds upon the case studies from the first edition to cover a broader array of underserved minority groups. Diversity and Inclusion in Quality Patient Care: Your Story/Our Story – A Case-Based Compendium, 2nd Edition is an essential resource for attending and resident physicians, nurses, staff, advanced practice providers, and students in emergency medicine, primary care, and public health.
With Inclusion, Steven Epstein argues that strategies to achieve diversity in medical research mask deeper problems, ones that might require a different approach and different solutions. Formal concern with this issue, Epstein shows, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Until the mid-1980s, scientists often studied groups of white, middle-aged men - and assumed that conclusions drawn from studying them would apply to the rest of the population. But struggles involving advocacy groups, experts, and Congress led to reforms that forced researchers to diversify the population from which they drew for clinical research. While the prominence of these inclusive practices has offered hope to traditionally underserved groups, Epstein argues that it has drawn attention away from the tremendous inequalities in health that are rooted not in biology but in society. This edition is in two volumes. The second volume ISBN is 9781458732194.
"This book will examine what is meant by culture, the ways in which culture intersects with health issues, how public health efforts can benefit by understanding and working with cultural processes, and a brief selection of conceptual tools and research methods that are useful in identifying relationships between culture and health. The book will also include practical guidelines for incorporating cultural understanding in public health settings, and examples of programs where that has occurred"--
