NEW INITIATIVE AIMS TO CURTAIL HEALTH DISPARITIES BY ADDRESSING ROOT CAUSES OF HEALTH PROBLEMS

By Dr. Gail Christopher

(AANEWSWIRE)The Joint Center Health Policy Institute (HPI) has launched a new Initiative, Place Matters: Addressing the Root Causes of Health Disparities, a targeted benchmarking and accountability system that will document progress and accelerate efforts to eliminate health disparities in places where it is needed most.

For too long, Native Americans, Hispanics and African Americans have died needlessly because of poor nutrition, lack of health services and other social conditions and habits that have contributed to minorities suffering disproportionately from a number of diseases ranging from cancer to high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease.

Our initiative will reduce health disparities by addressing the complex underlying causes of health disparities and disseminating strategies to help ameliorate these root causes. Researchers have determined that altering social determinants impacting individual wellbeing can modify health patterns, illness and health disparities. But any systematic and researched-based translation of this knowledge into policy and practice has been limited, particularly at the local level.

Until now.

The Place Matters initiative changes that trend. Simply put, we believe that by addressing the underlying causes of health disparities, we can make people healthier.

Already, the initiative has reached out to partner with the National Association of Counties, International City/County Management Association, and National Association of County and City Health Officials. Working with state and local public officials, administrators and community leaders, we use data from the 100 counties across the country with the highest concentration of minorities to prompt new policies and programs aimed at reducing disparities. More importantly, we will benchmark our progress, keeping records of what projects have the best results so we can repeat their success in other communities.

Clearly, our initiative has been launched at a time when America needs it. Our nation has just witnessed the type of human suffering, and race and class divisions that Americans had long forgotten, or thought only existed today on some other shores. In the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we saw what it is like to be poor and forgotten in America. Thousands of Black men, women and children were herded into the New Orleans Superdome, a chaotic shelter without enough food and water. Elderly patients were deserted and left to die in a nursing home. The travesties went on and on.

These same people have been preyed up for years in less explicit ways. After the killer hurricanes, their pain and suffering was transparent. But for decades their families, neighbors and colleagues have been the victims in the statistics that show:

l African American men have the highest overall rate for cancer deaths. They are one and a half times more likely to get the disease - and twice as likely to die from it as Whites.
l The rate of high blood pressure among African Americans in the United States is the highest in the world. Studies by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention have found that 36.4% of Black men ages 20 and older have high blood pressure, compared to 25.6% of White men.

l An estimated 2.3 million African Americans have diabetes, with Black men twice as likely to have diabetes as Whites of the same age. Mortality rates for African Americans with diabetes are 27% higher than Whites with the disease.

l The mortality rate for African American men ages 35 to 44 with coronary heart disease is 82.6%, compared to 38.8% for Whites of the same age.

Our goal is for the Place Matters initiative to turn the tide. We want this project to symbolize that the public and private sectors can work together and save lives. When we launched the initiative in September, Sen. John Kerry (D-Ma.) attended the announcement and talked frankly about America's healthcare services for the poor. "The truth,'' he said, "is that, as a result of Katrina, many children went to shelters where they got vaccinations for the first time. Thousands of adults are seeing a doctor for the first time in years. Illnesses lingering long before Katrina will be treated by a health care system that just weeks ago was indifferent. We have to act now to be sure it won't soon be indifferent again. We must demand something simple and humane: health care for every American -- not just when a disaster strikes, but every day of the year."

What's clear is that barriers, such as concentrated poverty, unemployment and inadequate educational, housing and transportation resources contribute to health disparities for minorities and low-income residents across the country. These conditions must be addressed, if real progress on health disparities is to be made.

Place Matters is a new beginning. It can demonstrate to the world that America can overcome race and class divisions, and that the victims of Katrina did not die in vain - they sparked a new commitment to saving lives and building healthy communities.

(Dr. Gail Christopher is Vice President for Health, Women and Families at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and director of the Joint Center Health Policy Institute.)