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The Partners for Advancing Health Equity (P4HE) Resource Library is a virtual portal containing action-oriented health equity research, practice, and policies. The library aims to increase equity in health by offering free access to field-tested, evidence-informed and evidence-based programs strategies and high-quality research.


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  • Racial disparities in health are among the most disconcerting forms of inequity in the United States. Divergent health outcomes between Americans racialized as White and those racialized as Black, Latinx, and Indigenous do not stem from biological or genetic differences. To the contrary, “race” comes to have concrete consequences through social, economic, and political systems. Yet the political…
    October 2023
    Advocacy, Community-rooted/Participatory Research, Systemic Determinants, Healthy Housing, Racism
  • In “Strategies for Naming and Addressing Structural Racism in Immigrant Mental Health,” Cerda et al. (p. S72) make a critical call to bring a structural racism framework into efforts to promote immigrants’ mental health. Mounting public health research shows that structures and systems of racism are associated with poor health, yet there have been limited applications of a structural racism…
    January 2023
    Systemic Determinants
  • This project is funded under the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s program, Community Research for Health Equity (CRHE), a community-led research program that seeks to elevate community voices and make the priorities of communities the primary goal of local health system transformation efforts. The goal of this community-based participatory action research study is to expose racist, ableist, and…
    April 2022
    Systemic Determinants, Racism
  • Asian, Black, Indigenous, and Latino Americans die earlier, have higher infant mortality rates, and suffer more chronic conditions and disabilities than most white Americans. These health inequities are due in part to systemic racism and the social determinants of health (SDOH). Racial equity tools enable decisionmakers to identify how policies and programs can disproportionately harm racial and…
    March 2022
    Systemic Determinants
  • Structural racism toward American Indians and Alaska Natives is found in nearly every policy regarding and action taken toward that population since non-Natives made first contact with the Indigenous peoples of the United States. Generations of American Indians and Alaska Natives have suffered from policies that called for their genocide as well as policies intended to acculturate and dominate…
    February 2022
    Policy & Law, Social/Structural Determinants, Historical Trauma, Systemic Determinants, Racism
  • Racism is not always conscious, explicit, or readily visible—often it is systemic and structural. Systemic and structural racism are forms of racism that are pervasively and deeply embedded in systems, laws, written or unwritten policies, and entrenched practices and beliefs that produce, condone, and perpetuate widespread unfair treatment and oppression of people of color, with adverse health…
    February 2022
    Policy and Practice, Systemic Determinants, Racism
  • Social and racial injustice and inequity plagued America long before the deep roots of systemic racism were underscored during the COVID-19 pandemic and the deployment of a vaccine to prevent it. Systemic racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice. Rather, it has been a component of the social, economic, and political systems in which we all exist, and it is a…
    November 2021
    Systemic Determinants
  • For generations, Indigenous Peoples have known that our health is intertwined with the health of our earth. Their worldview recognizes that being healthy means ensuring the natural resources that give us life are well cared for. In contrast, Western mindsets tend to view the natural world as an inventory of useful commodities—separate from, and existing only in service to, humanity. Overusing…
    October 2021
    Interventions, Historical Trauma, Systemic Determinants, Environmental Injustice
  • Introduction & Background: Global persistence of health inequities for Indigenous peoples is evident in ongoing discrepancies in health and standards of living. International literature suggests the key to transformation lies in Indigenous efforts to control Indigenous health and healthcare. Previous authors have focused upon participation, structural transformation, and culturally…
    September 2021
    Community-rooted/Participatory Research, Systemic Determinants
  • Darrick Hamilton, the Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy at The New School, has gained national recognition for shaping policy solutions to close the racial wealth gap, which refers to how hundreds of years of structural racism have deprived Black families of resources that accumulate and transfer from one generation to the next. The typical White family has 10 times the wealth…
    September 2021
    Systemic Determinants, Racism
  • Black people living in Africa must be involved in setting the priorities for global health research, policies and programs that affect their daily lives, in order to move away from a funding culture that fosters colonialism, racism and white supremacy. The killing of George Floyd in the United States in 2020 bolstered the Black Lives Matter movement that began in 2013 and sparked unprecedented…
    June 2021
    Interventions, Systemic Determinants, Global Health, Racism
  • In the 1980s, a set of historical city maps resurfaced to reveal a hidden facet of our neighborhoods—the redlined status. As it turns out, the implementation of these maps saved the housing sector and bolstered prosperity for some demographic groups but increased disparities in homeownership, wealth, and health for others. The structural inequalities set in place by federal policies over 80 years…
    May 2021
    Housing Discrimination, Physical Environment, Systemic Determinants
  • In a time where the world is recovering from a global pandemic, opinions surrounding healthcare are more relevant than they have been many years. In December of 2020, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published an article reporting that racial minorities were disproportionately affected by the consequences of COVID-19. Interestingly enough, one of the factors affecting these…
    May 2021
    Social/Structural Determinants, Social Environment, Systemic Determinants, Racism
  • The majority of hospitals and health systems are collecting race, ethnicity, language and other data on demographic and socio-economic factors about their patients. But how can health care organizations use that data to tell a story that guides the delivery of quality care and improves outcomes for all patients? A new Market Insights report from the AHA Center for Health Innovation describes how…
    March 2021
    Systemic Determinants, Racism
  • There is striking racial disparity in the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection rates in the United States. We hypothesize that the disparity is significantly smaller in areas with a higher ratio of green spaces. County level data on the SARS-CoV-2 infection rates of black and white individuals in 135 of the most urbanized counties across the United States were…
    February 2021
    COVID-19/Coronavirus, Systemic Determinants
  • The events of the past year raised our collective awareness of racial and ethnic health disparities, social inequities, and some of the systemic policies driving these inequities. In response to this awakening, numerous organizations issued statements condemning the injustices and committing to address inequities. In an effort to provide a more complete picture of how foundations have…
    February 2021
    Services & Programs, Systemic Determinants, Racism
  • The relationship between housing and health is more than just the four walls that shelter an individual or family each night. More broadly, the link between health and housing is a result of influences from both the individual home unit and a variety of structural and societal factors within a neighborhood. These elements have the potential to provide safety, recreation, access to transportation…
    May 2020
    Housing Discrimination, Social/Structural Determinants, Environment/Context, Systemic Determinants, Healthy Housing, Racism
  • Millions of people in the United States face health disparities related to social and economic factors, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and income. Understanding and addressing disparities is critical to improving health equity nationwide. See the subpage on disparities in maternal health to learn more about that particular aspect of health equity. (website abstract) 
    November 2019
    Policy & Law, Systemic Determinants
  • Transgender people experience intersecting forms of social marginalization and are disproportionately affected by health inequities. We elucidate a novel conceptual framework for transgender health research that theorizes the constructs and pathways through which social inequities produce health inequities for transgender populations. Drawing on theories of intersectionality and structural…
    October 2019
    Systemic Determinants, Transphobia
  • The determinants of health inequities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations include factors amenable to medical education’s influence—for example, the competence of the medical workforce to provide effective and equitable care to Indigenous populations. Medical education institutions have an important role to play in eliminating these inequities. However, there is evidence that…
    April 2019
    Interventions, Systemic Determinants
  • According the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), food insecurity “is defined as a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food”.1 Recent data indicate that approximately 12.3% or 15.6 million households in the United States (U.S.) were food insecure at least some time during the last year.1 The adverse social, physical, and…
    April 2019
    Systemic Determinants, Racism
  • 1 out of every 20 children under age six experiences homelessness—here's where change begins. I recently asked several friends and coworkers if they knew just how many children and families were affected by homelessness in the U.S. They were shocked to discover that an incredible 1 out of every 20 children under age six experiences homelessness. In Georgia, where I live, the statistics aren’t…
    August 2018
    Housing Discrimination, Systemic Determinants
  • Objectives: Although a range of factors shapes health and well-being, institutionalized racism (societal allocation of privilege based on race) plays an important role in generating inequities by race. The goal of this analysis was to review the contemporary peer-reviewed public health literature from 2002-2015 to determine whether the concept of institutionalized racism was named (ie, explicitly…
    April 2018
    Systemic Determinants, Racism
  • When comparing suicide in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous) population to that in the non-Indigenous populations of Australia, there are significant differences in the rates of suicide and the age groups at risk of suicide. The etiology of these differences includes a history of colonisation and its aftermath including a burden of intergenerational trauma in the Indigenous…
    September 2017
    Suicide, Social/Structural Determinants, Historical Trauma, Systemic Determinants
  • Idealized versions of health care are common, and access to health care is often viewed as an unambiguous good. In the social determinants of health literature, for example, access to health care is treated as an intermediate determinant of health. This conceals a simplistic inference: the better your access to health care, the better your health. The reality is more complex: a modern industrial…
    January 2017
    Services & Programs, Social/Structural Determinants, Historical Trauma, Systemic Determinants

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