Have you noticed how life expectancy rates, chronic risk factors, and negative treatment outcomes are higher amongst marginalized populations worldwide? More importantly, communities in crime-free and affluent neighbourhoods have longer and healthier lifespans than poverty-stricken populations. What do these glaring contradictions between marginalized and rich communities tell us about healthcare provision?
Simply put, patients with vast financial resources enjoy top-notch healthcare quality and positive treatment outcomes. In contrast, people struggling with poverty and financial burdens often avoid hospitals and see doctors only when the pain gets unbearable. The healthcare system is riddled with discrimination and unfair policies that create differences based on race, ethnicity, gender, and age.
Socioeconomic factors profoundly influence patient care quality, especially for people of colour and low-income populations. Health equity advocates fair and equal health outcomes and care access for all. Please keep reading to explore this concept and its significance in detail.
What is Health Equity?
Health equity means a system that allows everyone equal and fair opportunities to enjoy a healthy life. It demands policymaking and systematic shifts to eradicate poverty, racial discrimination, and socioeconomic challenges that aggravate health risks. Governments can promote health equity by offering free education, quality housing, employment opportunities, and healthcare access.
Health equity advocates also call for the inclusion of multicultural healthcare providers to meet the clinical care needs of diverse populations. Decades ago, the populations of African Americans, Hispanic and other ethnicities were strikingly less in the healthcare labour statistics. However, modern-day healthcare facilities actively recruit healthcare providers from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds.
There’s a growing demand for nurse practitioners and experienced leaders with a widening ethnic and racial diversity in nursing. Now, minority nurses are exploring lucrative nurse practitioner career options to secure rewarding leadership roles by addressing staffing shortages.
Nurse practitioners pursue advanced education, such as MSN and DNP programs, to develop clinical skills and actively participate in diagnosis and treatment design. In most jurisdictions worldwide, nurses assume the duties of physicians, such as diagnosing and treating illnesses. They use telehealth tools to consult senior practitioners and physicians while treating complex cases.
Many DNP nurses pursue research-driven initiatives to highlight health inequities and disparities concerning minority communities. Nurse leaders from minority communities make profound contributions to raise health awareness and improve accessibility for underrepresented societies.
Why Does Health Equity Matter?
Health inequities create profound economic burdens on a country and its healthcare system by fostering discrimination and disease across populations. Naturally, underrepresented and marginalized communities face the brunt of health inequities given their minimal resources and poverty-stricken lifestyles.
Health equity matters significantly as it advocates the need for patient-centric policies and healthcare systems to promote equal opportunities. It highlights the glaring health disparities between various communities living in the same country to emphasize inequities.
Achieving Social Justice
Health equity focuses on more than the resources or money required to reduce health risks and ensure treatment quality. It focuses on practices and policies that allow governments to uphold social justice by eliminating socioeconomic barriers to health quality. It encourages policymakers to elevate life quality without discrimination by reducing economic costs and making healthcare affordable for all.
Social justice demands equal representation and fair opportunities for all citizens to enjoy healthy and long lifespans. And health equity advocates insist policymakers design policies that ensure social justice by curbing health risks affecting all populations.
Serving Underserved Communities
Marginalized, indigenous, and minority communities typically populate poverty-stricken neighbourhoods with high crime rates and low socioeconomic benefits. These communities lack access to education, employment, and healthcare facilities, increasing health risks and mortality rates. There’s a direct association between substance abuse and racial/ethnic discrimination across minority communities.
Health equity highlights the need for progressive federal, state, and local actions to improve life quality and health outcomes for underserved communities. Health equity experts and researchers promote policies that enhance healthcare affordability, education provision, economic growth, and quality housing for marginalized communities.
Introducing Patient-Centric Models
Millions of families sink into the deepest pits of financial turmoil after a loved one is diagnosed with cancer. Hundreds of individuals take out personal loans and borrow money after doctors refuse to treat their patients without upfront payment. For decades, healthcare systems worldwide have served the affluent, denying quality care to poverty-stricken households in need.
The COVID-19 pandemic has served as an excellent opportunity to hit reset and create patient-centric models to transform conventional practices. Health equity principles support introducing health programs and subsidized packages that allow fair access and treatment quality. Affordability lies at the heart of patient-centric models that enable all populations to access diagnostic and treatment facilities.
Advocating Policymaking Shifts
Health equity promoters and investigators compel policymakers and governments to take action by highlighting inequities and discrimination. Without mounting research depicting alarming discrepancies in health outcomes between rich and marginalized populations, policymakers would never take action.
Demands for fair and equal opportunities to lead healthy lives compel policymakers and governments to roll out healthcare packages. Health equity discourses raise public awareness around electoral demands for affordable healthcare, free education, and quality housing.
Researchers also raised awareness around discrimination meted to marginalized and minority communities to rally the public against racial/ethnic injustices.
Final Thoughts
Health inequities impact everyone, rich or poor, because they undermine the economic health of a country. Rising health costs and falling wellbeing standards lead to economic slowdowns and recessions. In contrast, a healthy population with superior life quality contributes to economic growth and diversely skilled labour markets.
The costs of health inequities may impact minority and underserved communities more intensely. Still, no one remains immune to their implications. Promoting health equity and fair opportunities for all is crucial to achieving social justice and creating progressive societies.
