Best Practices in Capacity Building and Disease Management and Prevention to Address Minority Health Disparities

Abstract

Eliminating minority health disparities continues to be a goal for state health policymakers, planners, educators, and legislators. They are challenged to identify effective strategies and programs. To this end, we have developed this document to offer examples of promising practices in capacity building and disease management. These practices demonstrate that state and local efforts can be effective in reducing health disparities. This report presents examples of community-based activities, operational procedures or capacity building approaches in addressing minority health disparities. The sections of each entry are program description, innovation (a unique distinction of the program), results/progress (an assessment/evaluation), and sources of further information The phenomenon of health disparity is socioeconomically complex, and often requires intervention at many points to be effective. Therefore, some limitations in selecting ‘Best Practices” must be noted. Overall, it is difficult to qualify any program or practice as "best." Perhaps, “promising” practices is a term that will better serve us. Assessments of efforts to address minority health disparities are constrained by the fact that little validating research is available to prove one approach more effective than another. Consequently, the scope of the literature review and web scan was narrow. Nevertheless, we attempted to select practices that have offered some form of evaluation or an account of results or progress. We hope these examples in this document will be of use to a broad audience of stakeholders interested in improving the availability and quality of approaches addressing minority health disparities. They demonstrate the practical ways in which public and private entities are working together to improve the health of all citizens. A resource list of contacts, resources, and reference documents appears at the end of this report.