Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care

Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care | Committee on Understanding and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care | Why Bother?

books:

Unequal Treatment:...

	Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care Committee on Understanding and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care National Academies Press, 2002 - 782 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients' and providers' attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.

for more information click here

Incredibly well researched

This is a really important national study of health disparities in the US - mainly health disparities between African Americans and Caucasians (but other ethnic groups are occasionally mentioned). It shows that African Americans experience higher rates of certain medical conditions than other ethnic groups (e.g. diabetes), but also identifies clinical and practical barriers and forms of discrimination which result in inferior treatment. Importantly, it does not address inequalities which stem from discrepancies in insurance coverage -- this is a major limitation, I think.

A word of warning - this is published by the National Institutes of Medicine, so it is incredibly academic - there is a comprehensive, but somewhat excessive, literature review of some topics that lasts 126 pages. Useful for public health/epidemiology students (particularly grad students), but not for the general reader.

Although there is an Executive Summary at the beginning, it is also written in a very academic, rather than accessible, tone. So I would suggest the intended audience is really public health/epidemiology professionals.

for more information click here

Why Bother?