Health Equity
A Practitioner’s Guide for Advancing Health Equity is a resource for public health practitioners working to advance health equity through community health interventions. It provides lessons learned and practices from the field, as well as from the existing evidence-base. While health disparities can be addressed at multiple levels, this guide focuses on policy, systems, and environmental improvements designed to improve the places where people live, learn, work, and play.
This resource offers ideas on how to maximize the effects of several policy, systems, and environmental improvement strategies with a goal to reduce health inequities and advance health equity. Additionally, the resource will help communities incorporate the concept of health equity into core components of public health practice such as organizational capacity, partnerships, community engagement, identifying health inequities, and evaluation.
Alice Report (ALICE) is a United Way acronym which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, represents the growing number of individuals and families who are working, but are unable to afford the basic necessities of housing, food, child care, health care, and transportation. Through a series of new, standardized measurements, United Way is quantifying the size of the workforce in each state that is struggling financially, and the reasons why. These measurements provide a broader picture of financial insecurity than traditional federal poverty guidelines.
The Center for Multicultural Affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder has a distributive justice model, which describes the importance of working within the larger sociopolitical context rather than emphasizing the individual as the means to overcome injustices. This social justice framework also requires equality and fairness as an essential component that will foster cultural diversity.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines social determinants of health as factors that contribute to a person’s current state of health. These factors may be biological, socioeconomic, psychosocial, behavioral, or social in nature. This link explains how scientists generally recognize five determinants of health of a population.
The Implicit Association Tests in addition to race assess automatic (implicit) preferences regarding weight, gender, sexuality, age, disability, skin-tone, etc.
National Partnership for Action to End Health Disparities works is to increase the effectiveness of programs that target the elimination of health disparities through the coordination of partners, leaders, and stakeholders committed to action.
The National Equity Atlas is a comprehensive data resource to track, measure, and make the case for inclusive growth. The National Equity Atlas is a first-of-its-kind data and policy tool for the community leaders and policymakers who are working to build a new economy that is equitable, resilient, and prosperous.
The Office of Minority Health is dedicated to improving the health of racial and ethnic minority populations through the development of health policies and programs that will help eliminate health disparities.
The Office of Disease Prevention and Healthy Promotion and Healthy People 2020 have a 10-year agenda for improving the Nation’s health. Healthy People 2020 is the result of a multiyear process that reflects input from a diverse group of individuals and organizations. Healthy People 2020 organizes the social determinants of health around five key domains: (1) Economic Stability, (2) Education, (3) Health and Health Care, (4) Neighborhood and Built Environment, and (5) Social and Community Context.
Oral Health for All 2020 is an initiative of the DentaQuest Foundation. It is a multi-year effort to strengthen and unify the network, build upon current initiative strategies, and expand impact. The desire is for a realization of a shared vision by the year 2020:
“Oral health is essential to lifelong health and well-being.”
Policy Link is a research and advocacy organization that is focused health equity and access for the nonprofit sector. They work to create equitable public policies that will grow and strengthen communities across the nation. The Equity Manifesto was created as a means of sharing this mission.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has a new way to talk about the social determinants of health with this PDF article. Which provides an understanding that the programs and projects are united in that they each worked within the context of the social determinants of health.
Social and Health Equity is part of the Alameda County Public Health Department’s mission, to work in partnership with the community to ensure the optimal health and well being of all people through a dynamic and responsive process respecting the diversity of the community and challenging us to provide for present and future generations.
Unnatural Causes . . . is inequality making us sick? Is a four-hour documentary exploring racial and socioeconomic inequities in health.