As indicated by other counties, the populations experiencing these disparities have many strengths and traditions to draw upon for solutions. In the African-American communities, churches provide connections and leadership on community issues. Other models have provided the use of community engagement principles encouraged throughout any state and local processes addressing eliminating health disparities, whether funded by this initiative or not. Such community engagement principles include fostering openness and participation in the planning process, ensuring that those representing a specific community truly represent that community's values, norms, and behaviors, and using strategies that insure inclusion, representation, and equality in the planning process. For example, ensuring that those representatives who are included in the process participate in a meaningful way and share fully in the decision making process; and offering orientation and skill building opportunities so that everyone will have an equal voice in voting and other decision making activities.
Other possible shared decision making processes include developing cultural competence in the organization's staff, and communicating with and involving the community in the planning process. Other general solutions include addressing issues of unequal access to affordable, nutritious food, working to improve community environments that promote physical activity and wider mental well-being and quality of life, advocating for good quality, affordable housing and promoting education, literacy, and employment. The lessons and specific effective strategies should be shared with other communities so that successful approaches can be promoted and additional new approaches tried.
Members of communities must also be intricately involved in assessing the strengths, resources, and needs of the community, and in planning for and overseeing activities toward improved health status. Community members must become actively involved in designing and implementing strategies, as that will likely lead to more effective approaches. Relationships that lead to increased mutual knowledge, comfort, familiarity and trust must be built before launching into major new efforts. Finally, research indicates that money spent on prevention of sickness, chronic conditions, and injuries is an investment in preventing or reducing more serious and expensive health crises later.
The Use of Technology to Reduce Health Disparities
High technology medical innovation remains implicated as one of the most significant driving forces behind the high costs of health care in the United States. In addition, health care organizations are faced with an increasingly complex and uncertain environment. Research indicates that these factors interrelate to affect decisions made to acquire high cost medical technology. One recent study of hospitals in three states assessed the manner in which environmental variables affect technology acquisition decision making. The results revealed that among the important criteria are physician recruitment and retention and perceived competitive pressure. An analysis of the data reveals that technology is acquired as one means of reducing environmental uncertainty. Within a growing number of integrated health systems, collaboration acts to both control costs and reduce duplicative technology. However, research also indicates that in order for collaboration to be successful, a strong bond of trust must exist between decision makers in addition to any economic benefit derived from the union.
Decision making in health care involves two sets of related decisions, those concerning appropriate service provision on the basis of existing information and those concerned with whether to fund additional research to reduce the uncertainty relating to the decision. The model becomes the vehicle of health technology assessment, managing and directing future research effort on an iterative basis over the lifetime of the technology. This ensures consistency in decision making between service provision, research and development priorities and research methods. Research effort can then be focused on those areas where the cost of uncertainty is high and where additional research is potentially cost-effective.
Health promotion and care information systems and technology adopt different roles and characteristics, depending on multiple determinants, such as the goals pursued by the health care delivery systems. The importance of information in health services relates to its support to the aspects of management and operation: Included in the management and operation aspects is the use of technology. This technology usually sustains the day-to-day operation and management of health services and health care network, and support of diagnostic and therapeutic functions.
In health services, information systems and their associated technological infrastructure are oriented to the support of two functional levels; the logistics of healthcare; flow, registry, processing, and recovery of clinical and administrative data, and the administrative operation, accounting, financing, and human and physical resources management.
Thus, systems that utilize...
REDUCING RISKY BEHAVIOR FOR African-American TEENS An Intervention for Reducing Risky Behavior Among African-American Female Adolescents: Provider Cultural Competency Training The Office of Minority Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2013) quotes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As a way to introduce the topic of updating and enhancing the National CLAS (Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services) Standards. The quote is "Of all forms of inequality, injustice in health
Among the most important aspects to the health promotion plan will be the benefits associated with a care manager, who can ensure that all six core elements of CCM are implemented fully. If this is accomplished, there should be a significant reduction in health disparities for patient and caregiver outcomes across generations. References AHRQ. (2012). National Healthcare Disparities Report, 2011. No. 12-0006. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Retrieved
Abstract:Today, mental health in the U.S. has become the focus of a growing body of scholarship as researchers examine the antecedents to the nation�s current political polarization and increasingly violent responses to the multiple existential threats that confront humanity. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, has not only brought to the forefront the critical importance of public health but has also exposed the vulnerabilities in the nation's mental health infrastructure.
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