Take Action Now to Eliminate Health Disparities
Here are some easy ways to engage your colleagues and learn more about health disparities. These sites contain ready-made speaker kits and power point presentations with handouts, background information, and question-answer guides. Give a class or lunchtime seminar on health disparities or social justice.
- Help your Medicare patients and their families understand and sign up for the new Medicare drug benefit. Information on who to call, where to apply and what kind of coverage is available is covered in this Medicare provider toolkit.
- Take the Challenge! Student Action for Zero Health Disparities (309KB PowerPoint Presentation)
A slide show that outlines current health disparities with a closer look at the causes and student-driven solutions. (HTML VERSION) - The American Public Health Association (APHA) offers sample projects from around the country on its Community Solutions to Health Disparities Database.
- APHA is launching a tool to help local government agencies, activists and health professionals implement programs to reduce disparities in their communities. APHA has developed a database of solutions that are working in communities across the country. Searchable by category, key word, state and race/ethnicity, the database offers information, implementation advice and contact information for nearly 400 programs that are addressing health disparities.
- The Right to Equal Treatment: A Student Toolkit to Address Racial and Ethnic Disparities in U.S. Health Care gives background information about disparities and suggestions on how to educate yourself and your peers, enhance your school's curriculum, improve diversity at your school, address disparities in the hospital, and organize your peers to work together on community, state and national issues.
- The Healthy People slide show presents the goals and objectives of Healthy People 2010, as developed through a collaborative effort to establish a strategic public health plan for the U.S. It includes goals and objectives pertaining to health disparities.
- The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Henry K. Kaiser Family Foundation are currently undertaking an initiative to raise physician awareness about disparities in medical care, beginning with cardiac care. Why the Difference includes a speaker's kit with power point presentations focusing on health disparities and trust. It also addresses the Tuskegee experiments. Kaiser also has a webpage that serves as a clearinghouse for racial and ethnic minority issues.
- The Institute of Medicine has two power point presentations that capture the essence of their extensive research on healthcare disparities. Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Healthcare presents data on disparities in the U.S. Clinical Discretion and Disparities in the Clinical Encounter describes problems in the patient-physician relationship, including stereotyping and biases.
- Race, Trust, and Tuskegee: Professional Ethics, Broken Trust and Health Disparities examines trust as an important factor in eliminating health disparities. The U.S. Public Health Service's Syphilis experiment conducted from 1932 to 1972 at Tuskegee was a study in which well-respected researchers withheld commonly available medical treatment from African American males. This project uses this example as the framework to show how trust was broken. This speaker's kit contains a power point presentation, speaker's notes, and bibliography which are meant as a starting point for creating a presentation on Physician Ethics, Trust, and Health Disparities. The presentation should be broken into segments addressing some of the points, data, resources, and references to create a customized presentation that meets specific goals, needs, and timeframe.