Compared with whites, members of racial and ethnic minorities are less likely to receive preventive health services and often receive lower-quality care. They also have worse health outcomes for certain conditions. To combat these disparities, advocates say health care professionals must explicitly acknowledge that race and racism factor into health care. This issue of Transforming Care offers examples of health systems that are making efforts to identify implicit bias and structural racism in their organizations, and developing customized approaches to engaging and supporting patients to ameliorate their effects.
It’s been 15 years since the publication of the Institute of Medicine’s Unequal Treatment report, which synthesized a wide body of research demonstrating that U.S. racial and ethnic minorities are less likely to receive preventive medical treatments than whites and often receive lower-quality care. Most startling, the analysis found that even after taking into account income, neighborhood, comorbid illnesses, and health insurance type — factors typically invoked to explain racial disparities — health outcomes among blacks, in particular, were still worse than whites.
This research prompted the Institute of Medicine to add equity to a list of aims for the U.S. health care system, but efforts to ensure all Americans have equal opportunity to live long and healthy lives have been given less attention than have efforts to improve health care quality or reduce costs. A recent Institute for Healthcare Improvement white paper called equity “the forgotten aim,” noting as did the 2010 Institute of Medicine report, How Far Have We Come in Reducing Health Disparities?, how little progress has been made.
To reduce racial and ethnic health disparities, advocates say health care professionals must explicitly acknowledge that race and racism factor into health care. Less directed efforts to improve health outcomes, ones for instance that fail to consider the particular factors that may lead to worse outcomes for blacks, Hispanics, or other patients of color, may not lead to equal gains across groups — and in some cases may exacerbate racial health disparities.
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