SOPHE leaders continue to challenge us to be true to the call for an "open society." SOPHE has supported the Healthy People 2010 goal of eliminating health disparities through its Strategic Plan. SOPHE held an Inaugural Health Education Research Disparities Summit, Health Disparities and Social Inequities: Framing a Transdisciplinary Research Agenda in Health Education, August 8 and 9, 2005. Th...

A consistent framework has been developed for measuring health disparities and making comparisons across indicators with regard to the public health goals of Healthy People 2010. Disparities are measured as the percent difference from the best group rate, with all indicators being expressed in terms of adverse events. The 10 largest health disparities for each of five US racial and ethnic group...

There is little consensus about the meaning of the terms "health disparities," "health inequalities," or "health equity." The definitions can have important practical consequences, determining the measurements that are monitored by governments and international agencies and the activities that will be supported by resources earmarked to address health disparities/inequalities or health equity. ...

CONTEXT Reporting on health disparities is fundamental for meeting the goal of reducing health disparities. One often overlooked challenge is determining the best way to report those disparities associated with multiple attributes such as income, education, sex, and race/ethnicity. This article proposes an analytical approach to summarizing social disparities in health, and we demonstrate its e...

introduction: the aim of the present study is to show regional disparities in iran through measurement of the level of development of different provinces with respect to their accessibility to the health and medicare facilities. methods: to accomplish the above mentioned purpose, data regarding 18 health and medicare indexes for the years 2006-2008, have been collected. the quantified methods s...

The 2005 National Health Disparities Report found disparities related to race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status in the United States health-care system. While varying in magnitude, disparities were observed in almost all aspects of health care including cancer. Disparities were noted across quality and access to health care, levels and types of health care, various health-care settings, and ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the impact of smoking disparities on health disparities, in terms of gap in life expectancy, in Taiwan cities and counties. METHODS Using the decomposition method of life expectancy, the contribution of each disease category to the life expectancy gap was quantitatively expressed as the number of years of life. The smoking attributable fraction (SAF) was calculated for eac...

If we limit our gaze to epidemiologic or medicalized discourse about health disparities, we risk losing sight of the person living in a health disparity context. We may erase or make invisible the person from a health disparity group; pathologize difference at the population level and, by extension, stigmatize the individual; eliminate the upstream context or causes of disparities; and obscure ...

Health disparities in racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. are strongly associated with variations in tobacco use and accessibility as well as the quality of health care. Each year minorities in this country experience at least 60,000 excess deaths (deaths beyond what would be expected if they had the same sex and age-adjusted rates as the white population). Differences across groups can range ...

The increasing interest in the role of racism and racialization in health disparities, calls for exploring new paradigms in addressing and eliminating health disparities related to race/ethnicity. Cultural competence is conceptualized as one of the keys ways to address racial/ethnic disparities in public health and healthcare. However, for cultural competence to fulfill this role, it requires a...