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Category Archives: Racism
The AMA declares racism a public health threat
https://mailchi.mp/4422fbf9de8c/the-weekly-gist-november-20-2020?e=d1e747d2d8
On Monday, the American Medical Association (AMA) voted to recognize racism as an “urgent threat to public health”. At its annual meeting, the organization’s House of Delegates voted to take actions to confront systemic, cultural and interpersonal racism, including acknowledging harm and bias in medical research and healthcare delivery, funding research to identify risks of racial bias to health, and encouraging medical schools to teach students about the causes and effects of racism, and strategies to prevent adverse health outcomes.
The resolution was one of several proposed items aimed at addressing racial diversity and equity in medical education and care delivery. Over the past two years, the AMA has been moving toward a more progressive stance on health and social policy; in June the AMA Board of Trustees also pledged action against racism and police brutality in response to the murder of George Floyd.
A generational divide between older and younger doctors was also apparent during last year’s debates on Medicare for All, when the organization narrowly voted to maintain its opposition to single-payer healthcare in a close vote that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.
At this week’s meeting, however, the group gave its stamp of approval to proposals for a more limited “public option” coverage expansion. As more young physicians enter the field of medicine, we’d expect the AMA to become a stronger voice on a range of social and policy issues.
Cartoon – The 2nd Wave
It is undeniable: Racism is a public health crisis
39 health systems in 45 states and Washington, DC have committed to addressing racism and the public health disparities caused by racism. Read the full statement below or download the PDF.
As members and leaders of many healthcare organizations across the nation addressing the disproportionate Black and Brown mortality of the COVID-19 pandemic, we say without hesitation that Black Lives Matter.
No person of decency can look at the images of George Floyd’s killing without feelings of rage, horror, shame, and grief. The deaths of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor — and too many others — are unjust and unconscionable.
We must double down on our efforts. Systemic racism poses a real threat to the health of our patients, families, and communities. We stand with all of those who have raised their voices to capture the attention of people across the nation with a clear call for action.
The health systems we represent are deeply woven into the fabric of the communities we serve, live, and work in, and we stand united as frontline organizations against racism, injustice, and inaction.
Systemic racism results in generational trauma and poverty, while also unquestionably causing higher rates of illness and death in Black and Indigenous communities and communities of color. We have seen — in its rawest form — how the trauma of systemic racism adds to the historical injustices that have disproportionately affected communities of color. Health systems across the nation work to provide high-quality, compassionate care in the face of health disparities and poor outcomes resulting from social and economic inequities. In rural areas, where resources are spread out across larger geographies, we have seen healthcare organizations and community partners adapt to the shifting conditions with ingenuity and purpose.
These social determinants of health include poverty, inadequate housing, underperforming schools, police brutality, mass incarceration, food deserts, joblessness and underemployment, poor access to healthcare, and violence. All of these factors contribute to health inequities in our communities. And they serve as a recipe for pain, suffering, premature mortality — and civil unrest.
In our communities, there is also resilience, innovation, a tradition of faith, and a spirit of unity that manages to thrive even under the weight of this systemic burden. Imagine the potential for our communities with dramatically improved social and economic conditions and health outcomes.
It’s time to fully realize this potential. It’s time for action. We will work more intentionally with community-based partners in building and sustaining the sweeping change that is needed to ensure health equity across the country, and particularly in our most under-resourced communities.
As healthcare organizations, we are committed to being part of the solution, both within our organizations and in partnership with local community groups. We are focused on improving access to care and eliminating systemic racism, which contributes to poor health outcomes.
We have come together as health systems from all across the country as part of the Healthcare Anchor Network, a health system-led collaboration working to improve community health and well-being by leveraging all our assets, including hiring, purchasing, and investment for equitable, local economic impact. Here are some of the steps we are or will be taking to help overcome the healthcare disparities in the communities we serve:
- COVID-19: We are providing testing and direct care while also partnering with city and county health officials to provide educational programs, services and personal protective equipment to under-resourced communities, and advocacy for personal practices that flatten the curve.
- Inclusive, Local Hiring: We are implementing inclusive, local hiring and workforce development programs to remove barriers and build community hiring pipelines for people of color to find careers in healthcare.
- Inclusive, Local Procurement: We are directing spending to diverse and locally owned vendors and building the capacity of local minority-owned businesses to meet supply chain needs.
- Place-based Investment: We are leveraging investment assets to address the racial, economic, and environmental resource disparities that create poor health outcomes.
- Tracking Progress: We are measuring key processes and outcomes related to inclusive, local hiring, procurement, and place-based investment initiatives with a racial equity lens. We seek to understand this data in order to inform our institution’s internal and external response to the inequities embedded in our systems.
- Listening: Many in our organizations are learning about or becoming increasingly aware of the ways in which systemic racism has impacted our colleagues at work and members of our communities. Our institutions are committed to actively engaging and listening to our patients and colleagues of color, modifying our behavior where needed, and learning from their experiences. We seek to better understand and educate ourselves about this legacy of injustice and the institutional and systemic racism that persists in all areas of our society today. In that process of continuous learning, we can become better allies, advocates, and partners in dismantling systemic racism, evolving our anchor mission approaches appropriately to meet the needs of our communities.
We also are committed to continue working to address racism and the healthcare disparities it creates.
We commit to …
- Re-examine our institutional policies with an equity lens and make policy changes that promote equity and opportunity.
- Improve access to primary and specialty care.
- Continue to focus on helping our communities overcome chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and asthma.
- Continue to advocate for investments that create innovative solutions to achieve enduring improvements in access, quality, and health outcomes for our communities.
- Continue our commitment to hiring locally and promoting and retaining leaders of color.
- Renew and expand our organizations’ commitment to providing anti-racism and unconscious bias training for our administrators, physicians, nurses, and staff.
- Advocate for increased funding for social needs, social services, and programs that promote social justice.
Our society only truly thrives when everyone has an opportunity to succeed and live a healthy life. We are committed to moving forward together. By harnessing the collective strengths of our organizations, we will help serve our communities as agents of change.
The healthcare systems that have signed onto this statement are: Advocate Aurora Health, Alameda Health System, AMITA Health, Baystate Health, BJC HealthCare, Bon Secours Mercy Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston Medical Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, ChristianaCare, Cleveland Clinic, CommonSpirit Health, Cone Health, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health, Denver Health, Einstein Healthcare Network, Franciscan Missionaries Of Our Lady Health System, Gundersen Health System, Kaiser Permanente, Lurie Children’s, M Health Fairview, Maimonides Medical Center, Mass General Brigham, Northwell Health, ProMedica, Providence St. Joseph Health, Rush University Medical Center, RWJBarnabas Health, San Mateo County Health, Seattle Children’s, Spectrum Health, The MetroHealth System, Trinity Health, UC San Francisco, UMass Memorial Health, University Hospitals, University of Utah Health, VCU Health, and Yale New Haven Health.
What ‘Racism Is a Public Health Issue’ Means
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Epidemiologist Sharrelle Barber discusses the racial inequalities that exist for COVID-19 and many other health conditions.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, whether cases are flaring up, slowing to a simmer, or back on the rise in areas across the United States, the data makes one fact apparent: The viral disease has disproportionally sickened and killed marginalized communities. A New York Times analysis of data from almost 1,000 counties that reported racial breakdowns of COVID-19 cases and fatalities revealed that, compared to white Americans, African Americans and Hispanics were three times more likely to experience and two times more likely to die from the illness. The Navajo Nation has, per capita, more confirmed cases and deaths than any of the 50 states.
Many factors, like access to healthcare and testing, household size, or essential worker status, likely contribute to the pandemic’s outsized toll on communities of color, but experts see a common root: the far-reaching effects of systemic racism.
That racism would have such an insidious effect on health isn’t a revelation to social epidemiologists. For decades, public health experts have discussed “weathering,” or the toll that repeated stressors experienced by people of color take on their health. Studies have demonstrated the link between such chronic stress and high blood pressure, the increased maternal mortality rate among black and indigenous women, and the elevated prevalence of diabetes in black, Latino and especially Native American populations. The pandemic has laid bare these inequities. At the same time, outcry over systemic racism and police brutality against African Americans has roiled the nation, and the phrase, “Racism is a public health issue” has become an internet refrain.
What exactly is the nebulous concept of “public health”? According to Sharrelle Barber, a Drexel University assistant professor of epidemiology, the concept goes beyond the healthcare setting to take a more holistic look at health in different populations. “The charge of public health,” Barber told Smithsonian, “is really to prevent disease, prevent death, and you prevent those things by having a proper diagnosis of why certain groups might have higher rates of mortality, higher rates of morbidity, et cetera.”
Below is a lightly edited transcript of Smithsonian’s conversation with Barber, who studies how anti-black racism impacts health, about the many ways in which racism is a public health crisis:
When people say, “Racism is a public health problem,” what, in broad strokes, do they mean?
We’ve been observing racial inequities in health for decades in this country. W.E.B. DuBois, who was a sociologist, in The Philadelphia Negro showed mortality rates by race and where people lived in the city of Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century and found striking inequalities based on race. Fast forward to 1985, 35 years ago, and we have the [Department of Health and Human Services-sponsored] Heckler Report, one of the most comprehensive studies the country had undertaken, which again found striking inequalities across a wide range of health outcomes: infant mortality, cancer, stroke, et cetera.
There are various explanations for why these racial inequalities exist, and a lot of those have erroneously focused on either biology or genetics or behavioral aspects, but it’s important to examine the root causes of those inequities, which is structural racism…Racism is a public health problem, meaning racism is at the root of the inequities in health that we see, particularly for blacks in this country. So whether it’s housing, criminal justice, education, wealth, economic opportunities, healthcare, all of these interlocking systems of racism really are the main fundamental drivers of the racial inequities that we see among black Americans.
What are some specific factors or policies that have set the foundations for these health inequities?
Any conversation about racial inequities has to start with a conversation about slavery. We have to go back 400-plus years and really recognize the ways in which the enslavement of African people and people of African descent is the initial insult that set up the system of racism within this country. One of the major drivers that I actually study is the link between racial residential segregation, particularly in our large urban areas, and health inequities. Racial residential segregation is rooted in racist policies that date back at least to the 1930s. Practices such as redlining, which devalued black communities and led to the disinvestment in black communities, were then propped up by practices and policies at the local, the state and federal level, for example, things like restrictive covenants, where blacks were not allowed to move into certain communities; racial terror, where blacks were literally intimidated and run out of white communities when they tried to or attempted to move into better communities; and so many other policies. Even when you get the 1968 Fair Housing Act, the system finds a way to reinvent itself to still perpetuate and maintain racism.
Within segregated communities, you have so many adverse exposures, like poor quality housing or lack of access to affordable, healthy foods, lack of access to quality healthcare, and the list goes on. The chronic stressors within these communities are compounded in segregated communities, which then can lead to a wide array of health outcomes that are detrimental. So for example, in the city of Philadelphia, there’s been work that has shown upwards of a 15-year life expectancy difference between racially and economically segregated communities, black communities and wealthier white communities.
I imagine that sometimes you might get pushback from people who ask about whether you can separate the effects of socioeconomic status and race in these differences in health outcomes.
Yeah, that’s a false dichotomy in some ways. Racism does lead to, in many aspects, lower income, education, wealth. So they’re inextricably linked. However, racism as a system goes beyond socioeconomic status. If we look at what we see in terms of racial inequities in maternal mortality for black women, they are three times times more likely to die compared to white women. This disparity or this inequity is actually seen for black women who have a college degree or more. The disparity is wide, even when you control for socioeconomic status.
Let’s talk about the COVID-19 pandemic. How does racism shape the current health crisis?
The COVID-19 pandemic has literally just exposed what me and so many of my colleagues have known for decades, but it just puts it in such sharp focus. When you see the disproportionate impact COVID-19 is having, particularly for blacks, but also we’re seeing emerging data on Indigenous folks, it is just laying bare the ways racism is operating in this moment to produce those inequities.
Essential workers who had to continue to work during periods of stay at home orders across the country were disproportionately black and Latino. These are also often low wage workers. They weren’t given personal protective equipment, paid sick leave, hazard pay, and really had to choose between being exposed and protecting themselves and having an income during this period. So that’s one way racism operates.
Then we know that those individuals aren’t isolated, that they return to homes that often are crowded because of the lack of affordable housing. Again, another system of racism that compounds the effect. Then you think about places like Flint, Michigan, or places that don’t have access to clean water. When we were telling people, “Wash your hands, social distance,” all of those things, there were people who literally could not adhere to those basic public health prevention measures and still can’t.
Cartoon – All Lives Matter
“What is it that America has failed to hear?”
https://mailchi.mp/9f24c0f1da9a/the-weekly-gist-june-5-2020?e=d1e747d2d8
“What is it that America has failed to hear?” asked Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in March of 1968, calling riots the “language of the unheard”. “It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met.” Stubbornly, shamefully, we continue to turn a deaf ear: to structural racism; to institutionalized inequality; to a pandemic of police brutality and bigotry that chokes off the breath of black Americans as surely as a virus in the lungs or a boot on the neck. But the sound in the streets is thunderous.
We in healthcare must listen. We must hear that what killed George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, and Philando Castile, and Trayvon Martin, and Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others, as surely as the terrible actions of any single person, was the pervasive, insidious virus of racism, long since grown endemic in our country.
This week’s protests are a kind of ventilator, providing emergency breath for a national body in crisis. We must work—urgently—on the therapeutics of structural change and the vaccines of education and understanding.
At Gist Healthcare we are listening, and learning. As a team, we’ve committed to each other to be attentive, invested, empathetic allies, and to dedicate our individual and collective time, talents and treasure to antiracist work, in healthcare and beyond. Our contribution may not be large, and it will never be enough, but at least we hope it will be positive. We’d like to hear your thoughts and suggestions as well. For the moment, and for our colleagues, friends, and families, we stand with the protestors.
Black Lives Matter.
