“Addressing health equity should be the rule, not the exception. ”
Happy New Year! It is 2020 and time for those annual resolutions to get healthy, try something new, or travel. A new year and decade provides an opportunity to start fresh and reflect on the past. Changes in decades have come with policy change, research advances, and public health achievements.
The Pew Research Center indicates that the United States has seen advances in technology, shifts in demographics, and changes in public opinion.1 Demographic shifts are reflected in the nations newborn and k-12 populations who are majority non-white, racial or ethnic minorities, while public opinion on social issues have changed.1
With these changes over past decade and more specifically, the past few years there has been increased focus on understanding and addressing health equity to improve health outcomes by local, state, and national public health and healthcare organizations/systems. Health equity is achieved when “everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. This requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, and their consequences, including powerlessness and lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, quality education and housing, safe environments, and health care.”
America’s Health Rankings 2019 Annual Report highlights improvements have been made on decreased smoking rates, infant mortality, children in poverty and an increase in mental health providers.3 Despite these improvements, there is a growing income equality between the rich and poor, increasing climate change impacts, increased suicide rates in priority populations (e.g. American Indian youth, Veterans, LGBTQ youth), and coverage gaps for uninsured poor adults where Medicaid was not expanded.3,4 Federal, state, and local policies that negatively affect these populations opportunity to be healthy, structural inequities, organizational structure, discrimination, and implicit bias are just some of the factors shown to contribute to health inequities.5
So, while we look to 2020 and new decade, the resolution to achieve health equity is a revolving door, one which does not happen overnight, but through ongoing, intentional efforts to make sustainable changes.
To foster a culture of health equity, Public Health Beat will focus on highlighting strategies to address health equity in 2020, including highlighting organizations and partners supporting focused on reducing health equities in underserved populations. To have a chance to improve population health and achieve health equity keep those new year’s resolutions; addressing health equity should be the rule, not the exception.
References
1. Schaeffer, K. (2019). U.S. had changed in key ways in the past decade, from tech use to demographics. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/20/key-ways-us-changed-in-past-decade/
2. Braveman P, Arkin E, Orleans T, Proctor D, and Plough A. What Is Health Equity? And What Difference Does a Definition Make? Princeton, NJ: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2017. Retrieved https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2017/05/what-is-health-equity-.html
3. America’s Health Rankings. (2019). Annual Report 2019. Retrieved from https://assets.americashealthrankings.org/app/uploads/ahr_2019annualreport.pdf
4. Garfield, R., Orgera, K., & Damico, A. (2020, January 14). The Coverage Gap: Uninsured Poor Adults in States that Do Not Expand Medicaid. Retrieved https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/the-coverage-gap-uninsured-poor-adults-in-states-that-do-not-expand-medicaid/
5. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Health and Medicine Division; Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice; Committee on Community-Based Solutions to Promote Health Equity in the United States; Baciu A, Negussie Y, Geller A, et al., editors. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2017 Jan 11.