Minority Health and Health Equity Archive

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21769

Welcome to the Minority Health and Health Equity Archive (MHHEA), an electronic archive for digital resource materials in the fields of minority health and health disparities research and policy. It is offered as a no-charge resource to the public, academic scholars and health science researchers interested in the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities.

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2006 - 20072

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Author: search.filters.author.Meyers, KateSubject: search.filters.subject.health care

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    Reducing Disparities: Goals, Roles, and Opportunities Roundtable Themes and Implications
    (2006) Meyers, Kate
    A vast published literature documents the existence of disparities in health and health care in the United States. Today, many organizations seeking to reduce disparities are moving beyond documenting the problem to focusing on solutions. Most current nationally prominent initiatives to reduce disparities take place within health care systems and focus on specific conditions, populations, or care settings. Fewer efforts have been made to discern how public and private policy actors and decision-makers can work collectively to address the broader range of interacting factors that impact disparities – including but not limited to the health care system. Kaiser Permanente’s Institute for Health Policy, Kaiser Permanente Community Benefit, and The California Endowment saw an opportunity to bring together 30 experts on health disparities in September 2006 in San Francisco. This roundtable aimed to push the dialogue on health disparities beyond the usual boundaries of health systems and toward notions of multi sectoral collaboration, stakeholder engagement, and developing policy solutions to address the broad range of underlying influences on health.
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    Issue Brief: Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities
    (2007) Meyers, Kate
    Why is this Issue Relevant to Policymakers? Efforts to reduce the disturbing levels of racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care in the United States will continue to fall short unless the complex interplay of social, physical, and organizational influences is better understood and addressed through collaborative, interdisciplinary actions. What are Health Disparities? No universally accepted definition of health disparities or health inequities exists. To some, disparities are simply differences in health processes or outcomes between population groups. However, more precise descriptions focus on differences where one group is “losing” or where differences are seen as avoidable and unjust. For example, some differences between groups (such as men and women) are based on different physiology and are not “unjust,” and do not fall within the purview of health disparities. Other differences – such as average life span for racial or socioeconomic groups – are connected to issues of social advantage and are thus viewed as health disparities or inequities. In the United States, much work has focused on racial and ethnic health disparities, while many other countries focus more on socioeconomic differences.