The coronavirus pandemic has not caused health inequities in the United States, but rather has exposed and exacerbated them.
That's from a panel at Fortune's Brainstorm Health Conference in Dana Point, California, on Monday, just over a year after the federal COVID-19 public health emergency ended. It was the consensus.
“This has exposed deep cracks in our health care system,” said Dr. Uche Blackstock, founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity. “Many of us knew what those cracks were, but I think for a more general audience it was revealed in the following way.” [they] It had never been exposed before. ”
Dr. Jayasree Iyer, CEO of the Access to Medicine Foundation, similarly stated, “Health equity has been a chronic problem since time immemorial.”
Age, sex and gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and digital literacy are among the determinants of health equity, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) states that “all people have access to the highest level of health.” defined as “to achieve.” ” In the United States, for example, Black, Hispanic, Asian American, and Pacific Islander communities had higher morbidity and mortality rates from COVID-19, a 2023 analysis in the Avicenna Medical Journal found.
A ray of hope? According to Dr. Hala Borno, associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and co-founder and CEO of Trial Library, the pandemic has forced people to focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in healthcare. It is said that he woke up to the importance of sexuality (DEI).
“This has emboldened organizations to talk about DEI that they either don’t care about or don’t care about. [didn’t have] We lacked the bandwidth to do so before,” Borno said. “But I think now is the time to start defining what that means and how you can apply it consistently within your organization.”
The HHS Healthy People 2030 campaign promotes an increased focus on health equity and provides a toolkit for organizations to improve their own health and well-being. While such efforts are well-intentioned, Iyer said not enough is being done to ensure that people facing disparities have access to care, especially on a global scale. .
“There's still a lot of work to do,” Iyer said. “But it's possible, and there are great models out there for how this can be done. It's important to scale it up.”
Learn more about health equity below.
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