Group: Health Equity

Promoting Health Equity: A Resource to Help Communities Address Social Determinants of Health

This workbook is for public health practitioners and partners interested in addressing social determinants of health in order to promote health and achieve health equity.

This workbook was created to encourage and support the development of new and the expansion of existing, initiatives and partnerships to address the social
determinants of health inequities. Content is drawn from Social Determinants of Disparities in Health: Learning from Doing, a forum sponsored by the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention in October 2003. Forum participants included representatives from community organizations, academic settings, and public
health practice who have experience developing, implementing, and evaluating interventions to address conditions contributing to health inequities. The workbook
reflects the views of experts from multiple arenas, including local community. The workbook builds on existing resources and highlights lessons learned by communities working toward this end. Readers are provided with information and tools from these efforts to develop, implement,
and evaluate interventions that address social determinants of health equity.

Health Equity & IVP Webinar Series

This is Part 1 of a two-part webinar series on Injury, Violence, Health Equity & Social Justice.

An Introduction to Health Equity & Social Justice
The webinar opens with a brief introduction to health equity and social justice and their importance to public health practice, including injury and violence prevention. Prevention Institute encourages community health and health equity by facilitating a deeper collective understanding of how root causes — such as racism and poverty — shape community environments and norms which, in turn, influence outcomes for health, safety, and health equity. To learn more, download the Prevention Institute’s fact sheet, Links Between Violence and Health Equity.

Broadening the Context for Injury and Violence Prevention: A Cliff Analogy and a Gardener’s Tale
Featured speaker, Dr. Camara Jones, discussed the interconnections between health interventions, the social determinants of health, health inequity, and the mechanisms by which systems of structured inequity affect populations. Through the lens of the injury and violence prevention goals outlined by Healthy People 2020, Dr. Jones discussed how racism adversely impacts health outcomes and unfairly advantages or disadvantages specific individuals and communities. Using her celebrated article Levels of Racism: A Theoretic Framework and a Gardener’s Tale as a foundation, she offered perspectives on the relationships between race, ethnicity, social class, and health.

This is Part 2 of a two-part webinar series on Injury, Violence, Health Equity & Social Justice.

The second webinar in the 2014-2015 ASTHO-NACCHO-Safe States webinar series examined the social and political systems that generate health inequities, and showed how a local health department is working on these inequities through programs relevant to injury and violence prevention.

The Politics of Health Inequity: Public Narrative and Social Justice
Richard Hofrichter, PhD explored how racism and class exploitation are fundamental causes of health inequity, and how the dominant public narrative obscures imbalances in political power and serves to limit public health-driven solutions to programs and services instead of widespread social changes.

Taking Action to Achieve Health Equity: The Alameda County Public Health Department
Katherine Schaff, MPH discussed why the Alameda County Public Health Department (Oakland, CA) is focused on social inequities and health equity, how it promotes health equity through a comprehensive community-centered local policy agenda, and what it took to get there. She provided an overview of ACPHD’s work, including its Place Matters local policy initiative and other concrete examples of working on underlying social inequities.

Communities Taking Action: Profile of Health Equity

Communities Taking Action is a webpage tool that enables the user to earch by injury or violence for examples of state/local injury and violence prevention-related health equity programs. It is a collection of profiles that showcase successful community initiatives aimed at improving health equity. Promoting just and equitable health outcomes require social, cultural and physical environments that prevent illness and injury in the first place and a commitment to promoting racial and social justice. The profiles demonstrate how strong leadership, community engagement and advocacy, innovative thinking and changes in local policies and institutional practices can successfully converge to shape healthier, more equitable community environments.

A Practitioner’s Guide for Advancing Health Equity: Community Strategies for Preventing Chronic Disease

While this Practitioner’s Guide publication focuses on chronic disease, it provides a useful overview of health equity and how health equity can be incorporated into public health practice, as well as sections on ”Incorporating Health Equity into Foundational Skills of Public Health” and “Preventing Violence.

The website for this guide includes additional tools, strategies and resources.

Addressing Health Equity: A Public Health Essential

“How healthy we are when we are born, how likely we are to get sick as we age, and how long we can expect to live are all determined to a surprising extent by our place in society. Disparities in health among income, racial, and ethnic groups in the U.S. are significant and, by many measures, expanding.

This course serves as a primer for illustrating the root causes that shape health and health disparities. In addition to describing the complex interplay of social conditions associated with health disparities, it also provides a framework for exploring public and community health frameworks for addressing health equity.
At the end of this course you will be able to:
– Describe terms related to health equity.
– Identify how historically major advances in health status resulted from broad-based social reforms.
– Identify the health outcomes of affected populations.
– Describe the social determinants of health and how they contribute to health disparities and inequities.
– Describe the Healthy People 2020 approaches to address health inequity.
Illustrate the role of the public health workforce in addressing health inequity.
Describe evidenced-based approaches to addressing health equity”