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Showing results for tags 'Health inequalities'.
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Content ArticleTelemedicine has potential to address inequity in healthcare but not until certain barriers are addressed. This article from Joanna Pearlstein in Wired discusses how physicians and care organisations have to be creative and rely on partnerships and local resources, such as school district hot spots or public library broadband access, to make the system reliably work for all their patients.
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Content ArticleThe State of Care is the Care Quality Commission (CQC) annual assessment of health care and social care in England. The report looks at the trends, shares examples of good and outstanding care, and highlights where care needs to improve. The care that people received in 2019/20 was mostly of good quality. But while the quality of care was largely maintained compared with the previous year, there was generally no improvement overall. And in the space of a few short months since then, the pandemic has placed the severest of challenges on the whole health and care system in England.
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Content Article
Black women’s health matters (October 2020)
PatientSafetyLearning Team posted an article in Women's health
To mark Black History Month 2020, blog site Hysterical Women has launched it's first mini series, exploring black women’s healthcare experiences. The contributions of five black writers, shine a light on: black health and healthcare experiences black motherhood, black pain black mental health the experiences of black healthcare professionals. -
Content ArticleThe Health Foundation has launched a time-limited UK-wide inquiry to consider:how people’s experience of the pandemic was influenced by their health and existing inequalitiesthe likely impact of actions taken in response to the pandemic on people’s health and health inequalities – now and in the future.The inquiry is gathering evidence from a wide range of sources to highlight implications for the government decision making and the investment needed to ensure everyone can enjoy the same opportunity for good health and wellbeing. The Health Foundation aim to share the findings from the inquiry in Summer 2021.
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Content ArticleLockdown has been a seismic shock for every family and community. Sadly, the voices of the hardest hit have been heard the least. This report sets about to change this by exploring pandemic and lockdown reflections from a diverse group of expectant and new parents during the critical first months and years of their babies’ development. Charities Best Beginnings, Home-Start UK and Parent-Infant Foundation were alarmed that the voices of parents with new babies have been absent from key pandemic responses. As a result, they worked with Critical Research to survey 5,000 new and expectant parents on their lockdown experiences and found a mixed picture, shining a light on huge disparities between different families and communities.
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Content ArticleConvened shortly after President Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the Lancet Commission on public policy and health in the Trump era, offers the first comprehensive assessment of the detrimental legislation and executive actions during Trump’s presidency with devastating effects on every aspect of health in the USA. The Lancet Commission traces the decades of policy failures that preceded and fueled Trump’s ascent and left the USA lagging behind other high-income nations on life expectancy. The report warns that a return to pre-Trump era policies is not enough to protect health. Instead, sweeping reforms are needed to redress long-standing racism, weakened social and health safety nets that have deepened inequality, and calls on the important role of health professionals in advocating for health care reform in the USA.
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Content ArticleMost primary care clinicians are well aware that the climate crisis is a health crisis and of the immediate and significant health co-benefits of climate action, such as through reduced air pollution. However, when it comes to taking action, in our experience many clinicians do not make the link with clinical practice. This is perhaps a result of extrapolating from actions to reduce one’s personal carbon footprint in areas like energy, waste, and transport. Yet, the majority of general practice’s carbon footprint results from clinical activity. In this article, Aarti Bansal and Grant Blashki focus on clinical practice and outline six practical steps that primary care can take towards sustainable healthcare that align with evidence-informed and person-centred practice.
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Content ArticleThis report, the seventh MBRRACE-UK annual report of the Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths and Morbidity, includes surveillance data on women who died during or up to one year after pregnancy between 2016 and 2018 in the UK. In addition, it also includes Confidential Enquiries into the care of women who died between 2016 and 2018 in the UK and Ireland from epilepsy and stroke, general medical and surgical disorders, anaesthetic causes, haemorrhage, amniotic fluid embolism and sepsis. The report also includes a Morbidity Confidential Enquiry into the care of women with pulmonary embolism.
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Content ArticleLast year, the NHS published proposals for new legislation that is intended to reduce the role of competition in the NHS, and increase integration and collaboration between NHS organisations. The Patients Association have now submitted their response, making clear that while they support many of the aims of the proposals, they are deeply concerned about the complete lack of any clear role for patients in the new system. Co-design and co-production should become the default approach in the NHS, but instead the proposals take a traditional, paternalistic approach in which the NHS holds itself separate from patients. The Patients Association are writing to Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of NHS England and Improvement, to make clear that an appropriate role for patients must be included in the new proposals in order for them to be able to support any future legislation.
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Content ArticleRecent work has emphasised the benefits of patient-physician concordance on clinical care outcomes for underrepresented minorities, arguing it can boost communication and increase trust. Authors of this study explored concordance in a setting where racial disparities are particularly severe: childbirth. In the United States, Black newborns die at three times the rate of White newborns. Results examining 1.8 million hospital births in the state of Florida between 1992 and 2015 suggest that newborn-physician racial concordance is associated with a significant improvement in mortality for Black infants. Results further suggest that these benefits manifest during more challenging births and in hospitals that deliver more Black babies. They found no significant improvement in maternal mortality when birthing mothers share race with their physician. You can also read the news coverage in the Washington Post here. To access the research, follow the link below.
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Content ArticleAs the UK emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic ‘Build Back Better’ has become the mantra. Important, but we need to Build Back Fairer. The levels of social, environmental and economic inequality in society are damaging health and wellbeing. The aim of this report from the Institute of Health Equity is three-fold: To examine inequalities in COVID-19 mortality. Focus is on inequalities in mortality among members of BAME groups and among certain occupations, alongside continued attention to the socioeconomic gradient in health – the more deprived the area, the worse COVID-19 mortality tends to be. To show the effects that the pandemic, and the societal response to contain the pandemic, have had on social and economic inequalities, their effects on mental and physical health, and their likely effects on health inequalities in the future. To make recommendations on what needs to be done.
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Content ArticleIn this analysis, published by the BMJ, professor of public health, Sarah Salway and colleagues, argue that the UK health system must take urgent action to better understand and meet the health needs of migrants and ethnic minority people.
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Content ArticleWomen from ethnic minorities are voicing their concerns that they face endemic structural racism when seeking and accessing healthcare, and they feel that their symptoms and signs are more often dismissed. It is vital that patients are listened to when they say that they feel this is also due to structural racism in healthcare.
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Content ArticleOn 30 May 2020, NHS England and the NHS Confederation launched the NHS Race and Health Observatory, a new centre to investigate the impact of race and ethnicity on people’s health and to identify and tackle the specific health challenges facing people of black and ethnic minority origin.
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Content ArticleMind the Gap is a Handbook to raise awareness of how symptoms and signs can present differently on darker skin as well as highlighting the different language that needs to be used in descriptors.The aim of this booklet is to educate students and essential allied health care professionals on the importance of recognising that certain clinical signs do not present the same on darker skin. This is something which is not commonly practised in medical textbooks. It is important that healthcare professionals are aware of these differences so that care of certain groups is not compromised.
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Content ArticleRefinery29 UK has published a series of articles focusing on the gender health gap: Uncharted Bodies: Exploring The Gender Health Gap. They looked at five distinct areas in reproductive and gynaecological health where a lack of research and therefore data is directly affecting women’s health: endometriosishormonal contraception and how it affects women’s brainspolycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS)premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) vaginismus. Follow the link below to find our more.
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Content ArticleIn 2019 The King's Fund discussed the following eight key problems facing social care and called for reforms to address them: means testing: social care is not free at point of use like the NHS catastrophic costs: some people end up paying large amounts and even selling their homes to pay for care unmet need: many people go without the care and support they need quality of care: a wide spectrum of concerns, from 15-minute care visits to neglect and lack of choice and control workforce pay and conditions: staff are underpaid, leading to high vacancy rates and turnover market fragility: care providers go out of business or hand back contracts disjointed care: health and care is not integrated around the individual and causes issues such as delayed transfers of care from hospital the ‘postcode lottery’: there is unwarranted variation between places in access to care and its quality. The pandemic has shone an uncompromising light on the social care sector. In this article, Simon Bottery explores how COVID-19 has exacerbated these pre-existing challenges.
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Content ArticleCare Quality Commission (CQC) Chief Executive, Ian Trenholm, discusses the immediate priorities for CQC, what’s coming next with their Transitional Regulatory Approach, and further ahead to CQC's future strategy.
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Content ArticleThe emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus led to immediate concerns about the impact of infection on pregnant women. In response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic the MBRRACE-UK team instituted rapid notification of maternal deaths associated with SARS-CoV-2, following which notifications of SARS-CoV-2-associated maternal deaths were received in early April 2020. Expedited reviews were conducted into all deaths of women with confirmed or suspected SARS-CoV-2 infection during or up to one year after pregnancy, and any deaths of women who died from mental health-related causes or domestic violence, which might have been influenced by public health measures introduced to control the epidemic such as lockdown. This rapid report aims to identify lessons learned to guide future care and pathway changes in the context of infection transmission and the need for public health and NHS service measures to prevent infection.
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Content ArticleIn this article Yvonne Coghill, Director of the Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) Implementation Team in London, talks about how she is working with others to develop a race equality strategy for the capital.
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Content Article
In this Guardian Long Read, Neil Singh highlights that during his medical training, it was almost always assumed that his patients would be white. He argues this prejudice is harmful in its own right – and when it comes to dangerous skin conditions, it can be deadly. -
Content ArticleDrawing on a 2010 analysis of the reform and costs of adult social care commissioned by Downing Street and the UK Department of Health, this paper from Glasby et al., published in the Journal of Social Policy, sets out projected future costs under different reform scenarios, reviews what happened in practice from 2010-19, explores the impact of the growing gap between need and funding, and explores the relationship between future spending and economic growth. It identifies a ‘lost decade’ in which policy makers failed to act on the warnings which they received in 2010, draws attention to the disproportionate impact of cuts on older people (compared to services for people of working age) and calls for urgent action before the current system becomes unsustainable.
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Content ArticleIn this editorial for the British Medical Journal, Helen Haskell summarises the findings and recommendations of the Cumberlege Review, First Do No Harm. Helen argues that while the report has the potential to be a powerful tool for change in and beyond the UK, patients and families now need to see evidence of action.
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Content ArticleThis is a report and survey analysis from Runnymede, the UK’s leading independent thinktank on race equality and race relations. Results show that black and minority ethnic (BME) people face greater barriers in shielding from coronavirus as a result of: the types of employment they hold (BME men and women are overrepresented among key worker roles)having to use public transport moreliving in overcrowded and multigenerational households morenot being given appropriate PPE (personal protective equipment) at work. In all of these areas, most BME groups are more likely to be over-exposed and under-protected compared with their white British counterparts.
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Content Article
The Yentl syndrome is alive and well (March 2011)
PatientSafetyLearning Team posted an article in Women's health
More women than men die annually from ischaemic heart disease (IHD) in the developed world. This represents a reversal of fortune from previous decades and places women firmly as the new majority now impacted. Notably, the adverse IHD gender gap is the widest in relatively young women, where myocardial infarction (MI) mortality is 2-fold higher in women under 50 years compared with age-matched men. While it is now clear that there are many gender differences in IHD outcomes, including more frequent angina diagnosis, more office visits, more avoidable hospitalisations, higher MI mortality, and higher rates of heart failure in women compared with men, the aetiologies contributing to these differences are less clear.
