Plans for Reducing Disparities and Attaining Health Equity

Cosmas Zyaambo, Department of Health Behavior, School of Public Health, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, USA, Email: yaambozcosmas@yhoo.com

Received: 26-Aug-2022, Manuscript No. AJPMPH-22-76739; Editor assigned: 29-Aug-2022, Pre QC No. AJPMPH-22-76739 (PQ); Reviewed: 16-Sep-2022, QC No. AJPMPH-22-76739; Revised: 22-Sep-2022, Manuscript No. AJPMPH-22-76739 (R); Published: 30-Sep-2022

Description

Access to the social determinants of health, specifically from income, power, and status, leads to health equity. People who have persistently been denied access to these three variables are disproportionately affected by health disparities and have worse health outcomes than those who do. Equitable distribution of resources would be giving everyone the same amount; otherwise, equity would not exist. Resources need to be distributed in accordance with the individual need-based principle in order to achieve health fairness. “Health is a condition of total physical, mental, and social well-being and not only the absence of disease or infirmity,” asserts the World Health Organization. A society’s economic and social standing and the quality of its population’s health might reveal information about its level of development. Health is intertwined with all other rights as a fundamental human need and right. The discussion of health must therefore include all other fundamental human rights.

Differences in the standard of healthcare and health among various communities are referred to as health equity, also known as health disparity. Health equity, as opposed to health equality, is the lack of differences in areas of health that may be changed or improved. Since some aspects of health are outside the control of humans, there is no way to achieve total equality in health. A certain degree of social unfairness is implied by equity. Therefore, we tend to state that there is a health discrepancy if one population dies earlier than another due to genetic variations, a non-remediable/controllable issue. On the other side, a situation would be referred to as a health disparity if a community had a shorter life expectancy because they lacked access to medicines. The “presence of disease, health outcomes, or access to health care” may differ amongst populations that are distinct in terms of racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, ability, or socioeconomic position. Having equality in health is necessary to start establishing health equity, even though it is critical to understand the differences between the two.

Plans for achieving health equity

Enhancing healthcare for ethnic populations through provider-based incentives; patients of colour are not treated equally to white patients, which is one cause of health disparity. One suggestion for eradicating provider bias is developing provider-based incentives to improve care parity for white and non-white patients. Given how well money influences medical behavior, financial incentives are frequently used.

Application of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM); Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) has the potential to improve health equity by lowering provider bias. EBM can theoretically lessen inequities, but other research indicates that it might actually make them worse. EBM’s inclusion of clinical inflexibility in decision making and its beginnings as a wholly cost-driven metric are some of its noted drawbacks.

Raising consciousness; the most frequently mentioned strategy for enhancing health equity involves raising public knowledge. One of the main reasons why there haven’t been any notable improvements in lowering health disparities in ethnic and minority populations is a lack of public awareness. A more informed public would result in a more informed Congress, more readily available disparity statistics, and more study into the problem of health inequalities.

The Framework for Gradient Evaluation; the body of research demonstrating which programmes and initiatives are most successful in eradicating health disparities is rather thin. Therefore, it is critical that policies and programmers that aim to impact health disparities be more thoroughly assessed. A policy instrument called the Gradient Evaluation Framework (GEF) can be used to evaluate whether a policy will lead to increased health equity for children and their families.

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