In the current rapidly evolving healthcare environment of the United States, social justice programs in pre-medical and medical education are needed to cultivate socially conscious and health professionals inclined to interdisciplinary collaborations. To address ongoing healthcare inequalities, medical education must help medical students to become physicians skilled not only in the biomedical ...

We survey recent research on mixed-integer rounding (MIR) inequalities and a generalization, namely the two-step MIR inequalities defined by Dash and Günlük (2006). We discuss the master cyclic group polyhedron of Gomory (1969) and discuss how other subadditive inequalities, similar to MIR inequalities, can be derived from this polyhedron. Recent numerical experiments have shed much light on th...

Background: Health equity is “having fair access to healthcare, utilizing it according to actual needs, paying for it based on financial capacity and finally, having an acceptable level of health”. Health equity is an underlying principle of the universal declaration of human rights. Equitable distribution of hospital beds increases people’s access to healthcare services and as a result, improv...

BACKGROUND Spatial accessibility indices are increasingly applied when investigating inequalities in health. Although most studies are making mentions of potential errors caused by the edge effect, many acknowledge having neglected to consider this concern by establishing spatial analyses within a finite region, settling for hypothesizing that accessibility to facilities will be under-reported....

The inadequate supply of health workers and demand-side barriers due to clinical practice that heeds too little attention to cultural context are serious obstacles to achieving universal health coverage and the fulfillment of the human rights to health, especially for the poor and vulnerable living in remote rural areas. A number of strategies have been deployed to increase both the supply of h...

Corruption, an undeniable reality in the health sector, is arguably the most serious ethical crisis in medicine today. However, it remains poorly addressed in scholarly journals and by professional associations of physicians and bioethicists. This article provides an overview of the forms and dynamics of corruption in healthcare as well as its implications in health and medicine. Corruption tra...

Published in this issue of the REVISTA ESPAÑOLA DE CARDIOLOGÍA, “Variations Among Spanish Regions in the Use of Three Cardiovascular Technologies,” by FitchWarner, García de Yébenes, Lázaro and de Mercado, and Belaza-Santurde.1 The authors highlight a statistical finding in their article: the linear dependency of the use of three therapeutic cardiovascular technologies (percutaneous coronary in...

if global trade were fair, it is argued, then international aid would be unnecessary and inequalities inherent to the economic system would be justifiable. here, we argue that while global trade is unfair, in part because richer countries set the rules, we believe that additional interventions must go beyond trade regulation and short-term aid to redress inequalities among countries that will p...

Let P be a linear, elliptic second order symmetric operator, with an associated quadratic form q, and let W be a potential such that the Hardy inequality λ0 ∫ Ω Wu 2 ≤ q(u) holds with (non-negative) best constant λ0. We give sufficient conditions so that the spectrum of the operator 1 W P is [λ0,∞). In particular, we apply this to several well-known Hardy inequalities: (improved) Hardy inequali...

We find sufficient conditions for a probability measure μ to satisfy an inequality of the type ∫ Rd fF ( f ∫ Rd f 2 dμ ) dμ ≤ C ∫ Rd f2c∗ ( |∇f | |f | ) dμ + B ∫ Rd f dμ, where F is concave and c (a cost function) is convex. We show that under broad assumptions on c and F the above inequality holds if for some δ > 0 and ε > 0 one has ∫ ε 0 Φ ( δc [ tF ( 1t ) Iμ(t) ]) dt <∞, where Iμ is the isop...