Health Equity

I recently attended a National Institutes of Health (NIH) meeting concerned with criminal justice interventions. Speakers emphasized the importance of involving people with lived experience—which everyone understood to mean persons who have experienced arrest and incarceration. More

In our bitterly partisan age, where science and public health are distrusted, even denigrated, there is a better part of America. More

We broaden our understanding of community power by going beyond traditional measures of voting and voting rights. Our objectives are to (1) create county-level measures of community power that are more expansive than voting and (2) explore the descriptive and geographic patterns of community power. More

The implications of the Department of Justice’s action to eliminate the “disparate impact” test, which provides the legal foundation for removing discriminatory barriers in public health and health care. More

Despite spending more per capita on healthcare than any other nation, the United States experiences declining life expectancy and increasing chronic disease burden—a paradox reflecting fundamental limitations in the current treatment-centered, facility-based care system. This paper introduces Neighborhood Nursing, an innovative universal care infrastructure designed to shift the US healthcare toward proactive, prevention-centered care organized geographically in neighborhoods. More

Despite the dynamic and multidimensional nature of the legal landscape for abortion, the negative effects of restrictive state abortion policies are beginning to emerge. More

See all articles in the special issue, Mental Health and Substance Use Challenges Facing the United States: What Can State Policymakers… More

Throughout the last 50 years, the disability rights movement has made significant progress in providing statutory protections for people with disabilities in the United States. More

Lean management is a sociotechnical approach to quality improvement that aims for consistency in work processes and outcomes. This can be leveraged to reduce inequities by ensuring delivery of high-quality care to meet the needs of patients with diverse backgrounds. Despite recent efforts in the field, there is limited study on how managers implement health equity and workforce diversity goals as strategies to improve patient care. Given the important role of leadership in fostering workplace culture, we examined leader activities and specifically their use of lean management practices to support equity initiatives in health care. More

A growing body of scholarship and practice in public health attests to the importance of addressing differences in power as a fundamental determinant of health inequities. To pursue health equity, public health practitioners must move beyond identifying differences in health outcomes among populations (disparities) to articulating why those differences are unfair or unjust (inequities) and then identifying structures, such as laws, policies, practices, and norms, that advantage some and disadvantage others. More