Tuesday, October 17, 2023 | The Latest Research, Commentary, And News From Health Affairs
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John, ICYMI, Rashad Burgess of Gilead Sciences joined our health equity podcast, Research and Justice For All, to discuss how private sector companies can advance health equity goals.
In the October issue on Tackling
Structural Racism In Health, Zachary Dyer and coauthors quantify historically contingent disparities in neighborhood resources and resulting health inequities through the creation of a Structural Racism Effect Index.
The index consists of
nine domains: built environment, criminal justice, education, employment, housing, income and poverty, social cohesion, transportation, and wealth.
Dyer and coauthors note that this index addresses shortcomings of existing indices.
They document that existing measures "do not fully capture the upstream aspects of discriminatory policies," "do not measure resource availability at the community level" adequately, and do not "specifically consider the legacy of structural racism," among other shortcomings.
After calculating Structural Racism Effect Index scores for more than 70,000 census tracts across the country, Dyer and coauthors find "this summary index correlated more strongly with life expectancy and other health measures than several widely used area-level measures of social determinants of health."
Alan Weil interviews Chidinma Ibe of Johns Hopkins University on her recent Health Affairs paper, which provides a closer understanding of the value of community health workers' (CHW) voices, social risk factors, and how structural racism shapes CHWs' approach to intervention
delivery in structurally vulnerable communities.
Ibe and coauthors assert that their findings underscore the need to embed antiracist principles in the policies and practices that affect the public health workforce.
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