Public Health Professionals Petition to Accelerate the Pace of Change in Local, State, and National Efforts to Achieve Health Equity
March 26, 2022
Delivered to the US Congress, NIH, and CDC
Health inequity did not start with the COVID pandemic and will not cease until achieving health equity becomes a priority at the local, state, and national levels across all domains of political, health, economic, academic, research, and social spheres of influence. The current pace of change is too slow and deeply unsatisfactory. The pandemic has encouragingly drawn attention to health disparities. However, this discussion is largely centered around modest improvement in current processes and approaches. Our humanity compels us to demand radical change in the status quo.
The US spends too much on health care and health research not to see better gains in eliminating health disparities. Life expectancy in the United States has not kept pace with our gross domestic product when compared to other industrialized nations. We have accepted chronic and yawning health disparities, especially for racial/ethnic minorities and low-income communities, for too long. We want to see eliminating health inequity as a national priority.
Currently, accelerating health equity lacks clear workable theories and pathways. The science has not caught up with the need to address inequity, which is deeply entrenched in the American fabric. Interdisciplinary innovation is needed for novel problem-solving. Public health advocacy should not continue to be primarily outside of the scope of science and funding because major gains in health equity can be achieved through changes in legal, political, regulatory, and community action and intervention. In many cases, addressing community needs around health cannot wait for the science to act, especially where a health issue has been chronically understudied and underfunded and is affecting a community in real-time. Further, the siloing with research funding and training models have hindered the ability of public health to adapt to change and heed calls for social reform. The public health social contract is to eliminate disease and to ensure that socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, sexual identity, geography, gender, and other social categories do not determine health outcomes.
Public Health Liberation welcomes an open and honest discussion about the state of health inequity and seeks ways to partner with you in your role to help shape policies and solutions. Below, we outline areas of policy, research, and community development needs.
Signatories
Christopher Williams (Founding Director), A. Eden, J. Goodkind, J. Birungi, R. Slavensky, M. Clearfield, R. Redman, I. Molina, M. McCall, K. Farey, C. Erickson, M. Chen, N. Ketchum, K. Mendoza, I. Singh, B. Yap, S. Pailla, J. Deutsch, P. Le, A. Hasan, J. Nelson, R. Cheezum, J. Morris, S. High, C. Reif, N. Kim, L. Nocera, A. Gomez, J. Yue, K. White, A. Clodius, D. Harris, L. Rennis, M. Brown, L. Cifuentes, A. Akhter, C. Cabeza, D. Sumpter, B. Duran
About Public Health Liberation | www.publichealthliberation.com
Public Health Liberation is a national non-profit headquartered in Washington, DC. We seek to accelerate the pace of change in eliminating health inequity in the United States through all available means. It places importance on local action and accountability by engaging across health, political, economic, and social systems. Public Health Liberation is a trans-discipline, welcoming all backgrounds and areas of expertise. PHL is developing resources and programming to help those who practice PHL to have the knowledge and skills to join any decision-making table to provide accountability for and connections to community health. We are concerned about cultivating fertile ground within communities to pursue practices of liberation that reflect their social and economic reality. Our primer will be published in summer 2022. We espouse PHL as a theory, research method, training model, and professional practice.
Needed Areas of Policy, Research, and Community Development
Public Health Liberation as theory, transdisciplinary practice, and a model of educational and community training, that includes support for a new field of science and applied equity
The cost savings of eliminating health disparities in the US
Community health leadership development, skills-building, and resource support for collective self-help
Studying the role of and providing support and resources for women community health leadership and advocacy
Improving hospital reimbursement models for community health equity leadership
Funding a national public health workforce that is cross-trained and multi-disciplinary to assist communities and localities work through reducing structural barriers and social determinants of health
Supporting population health interventions to respond to real-time challenges
Identifying minority populations' barriers to self-advocacy to include perceived or actual threats to collective action and inadequate institutional responsiveness to expressed needs
Interfacing with state and local governments and organizations to implement evidence-based solutions to accelerate health equity and eliminate health disparities
Tailored research to significantly reduce intersectional and syndemic health disparities by race, gender, sexual orientation, educational attainment, and community membership
Improving funding and models of care to support aging in place, including mobile services
Incentivizing and cultivating community-driven agency and self-advocacy
Encouraging and supporting public research within real-world constraints
Developing databases to track and monitor social, political, and economic determinants of health to anticipate and respond to health inequity reproduction
Measures of structural racism using modeling with the US as "the exposure"
Analysis and interruption of market performance and failures that contribute to poor community health
Improving state and local health program planning and implementation, including models that encourage cross-departmental collaboration within states and localities
Studying and eliminating the health legacy of collective trauma to groups such as American Indians, descendants of US slavery and Jim Crow, and exploited racial and economic groups
Support immigration reform to improve Latinx health disparities and vulnerabilities
Creating transparency and greater access to population health data, including hospital data, for analysis and use in policy development
Broadening government-sponsored health research priorities to include system functioning and analysis across economic, political, and social domains
Diversifying health research and intervention funding and reducing application barriers for community-based health improvement organizations