Making sure everyone gets quality care – opinion
Surveys show that most of us think everybody deserves safe and effective healthcare.
But the same surveys show that most of us don’t realize that that patients from certain racial and ethnic minorities often receive much lower quality care than most Americans.
In her column this month, Dr. Lori Whittaker, a family physician and a consultant with the Puget Sound Health Alliance, writes about efforts to close this health-care quality gap.
Gaps in Quality Care are Wider for Certain Groups in Our Community
By Dr. Lori Whittaker
As a doctor, I am concerned about whether people in the Puget Sound region and across the country get health care that is safe and effective.
We know that there are sometimes gaps in the quality of healthcare delivered, and that these gaps are even wider for people in certain minority groups, people whose primary language is not English, and people who are socially or economically disadvantaged.
We know, for example, that people in racial or ethnic minority groups are more likely to have chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes, and are more likely to suffer disability and death from such conditions.
Organizations including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Puget Sound Health Alliance, Seattle Children’s and Harborview are working on tackling these racial and ethnic disparities in health care.
The vision and goal is to ensure that safe and effective health care is provided for everyone.
Which is what Americans think should happen. A recent survey by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that people overwhelmingly agree that everybody deserves safe and effective care.
The problem, pollsters learned, was that a sizeable portion of our citizens didn’t realize that there are racial and ethnic differences in who gets safe and effective health care.
The truth is that all health care is not equal. But certainly racial and ethnic disparities are not a big problem for health care in our region…or are they?
Did you know that here in the Puget Sound region we live in one of our country’s most diverse communities? On a given day you can walk through the Rainier Beach and Othello neighborhoods in southeast Seattle and hear 60 different languages and dialects spoken there.
60! Somali, Thai, Amharic, Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian, Vietnamese, Korean…the list goes on and on.
Now imagine that you are a doctor or other health care professional who needs to communicate effectively with patients who know very little English, at a time when the patient is in pain or at their most vulnerable.
Communication between patients and doctors or nurses is essential for appropriate delivery of effective care, so imagine the challenge that so many possible language barriers can create.
In addition to language issues, disparities can arise for many other reasons: low levels of literacy and “health literacy” (which is how easily people can understand health care jargon), cultural differences, and economic barriers. Despite these barriers, the community as a whole is beginning to work together to ensure that everyone gets safe and effective care.
Our own Puget Sound Health Alliance is helping to make connections between doctors’ offices, hospitals and community groups in an effort to build bridges so we can work together to achieve health equity.
The first step in tackling any problem is knowing the facts. That’s why you may have been asked to state your race, ethnicity or primary language when you last visited the doctor or hospital.
Health care teams in hospitals and clinics who ask this are tracking this information to make sure that they provide every patient with high quality health care.
The Health Alliance is looking at novel ways of analyzing the regional quality data it is collecting to help identify healthcare disparities.
Someday, we hope that the public Community Checkup report (www.WACommunityCheckup.org), which compares health care provided in local clinics and hospitals, will also measure progress toward eliminating health disparities.
Yes, there are racial and ethnic disparities in health care-even in our own community, which is one of the most diverse in the country. But by being aware of the problem, and everyone working on it together, we can do something about it.
Dr. Lori Whittaker is a practicing family physician who provides consultation to the Puget Sound Health Alliance.
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