Understanding Inequality in Health Care and Why Care Disparity Is Unconscionable: What Can Be Done About It?

Presentation Description:

To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System is a landmark report issued in November 1999 by the U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM). IOM reported about deaths resulting from medical mistakes that occasioned patient mortality or life-changing severe injury. The report created an increased awareness and focus away from U.S. medical providers’ errors to emphasize a message of patient safety. Efforts to improve patient safety, patient-centered care, and provider accountability post the report release that continues today, Donaldson, M. S. (April 2008).

GDP spending on health. The U.S is enamored with health care, not health prevention; a paradigm shift is needed to redesign the fractured U.S health structure into one based on systems-thinking design and development. Social inequality is the foundation of healthcare inequity (Wilkinson & Pickett 2010) and manifested as social determinants of health. A brief discussion about life course theory and upstream healthcare issues and counter-arguments for the epigenetic view of disease transmission. If we may consider a population disproportionately impacted by social determinants of health in the U.S—the reported health measures of African Americans lag most other racial minority groups. Compared with whites, black men and women face higher risks of chronic illness, infection, and injuries.

The average lifespan for African Americans is six years less compared with whites. If we can begin to acknowledge that health outcomes are often dependent on factors outside of the control of individual patients, their physicians, or their health coverage, then we can begin to understand why reforming the healthcare system is proving to be an indomitable task,  Vital Signs: Racial Disparities in Age-Specific Mortality Among Blacks or African Americans — United States, 1999–2015 (May 5, 2017)

Creating strategies for interrupting disease transmission using community collaboration and public health action. A radical shift needed to bolster and redesign ACA measures, policy, and legislative imperatives for sustainable change. What can a citizen do about future healthcare policy and legislative agendas that promote health system service delivery and organizational transformation?

Webinar Presented by:

Glen Willock, MS, MHIA, MPhil

Assistant Professor - Health Administration & Public Health Programs.

Roberts Wesleyan College