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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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  • Objective: Sleep disturbances during pregnancy are associated with gestational diabetes and excessive weight gain. Diet could potentially play a role in these relationships, yet examinations of sleep and diet in African American pregnant populations are scarce. Methods: The study population includes pregnant African American women from Detroit, MI (n=53). At the baseline study…
    March 2020
    Maternal/Child Health
  • Public voices have largely been absent from the discussions about open access publishing in medical research. Yet the public have a strong interest in ensuring open access of medical research findings because of their roles as funders, advocates, research participants, and patients. By limiting access to research outputs, the current publishing system makes it more difficult for research to be…
    February 2020
    Communication
  • Social isolation and loneliness are serious yet underappreciated public health risks that affect a significant portion of the older adult population. Approximately one-quarter of community-dwelling Americans aged 65 and older are considered to be socially isolated, and a significant proportion of adults in the United States report feeling lonely. People who are 50 years of age or older are more…
    February 2020
    Aging and Life Course
  • One in five Americans lives in a rural area, including about 18 million women of reproductive age, but key indicators, including mortality figures, show that the health of mothers and children in these communities lags behind that of their urban peers and is worsening. Nationwide, child mortality rates have declined over the past decade, but recent research shows that improvement among infants…
    February 2020
    Maternal/Child Health
  • Over the past decade, there has been increasing interest in expanding access to college education in the US. This column examines how changes in college access in the US at the end of the 20th century affected schooling and health-related behaviours and outcomes. Increased access to two-year college, in particular, has had a positive impact on health-related behaviours such as smoking or…
    February 2020
    Postsecondary Education
  • Social determinants of health (SDoH) are the conditions in which people live and work that shape access to essential social and economic resources. Calls for healthcare systems to intervene on unmet social needs have stimulated several large-scale initiatives across the country. Yet, such activities are underway in the absence of a unifying conceptual framework outlining the potential mechanisms…
    February 2020
    Interventions, Services & Programs, Social/Structural Determinants
  • We tend to study health inequalities as differentials in disease and death that exist within a population. But the most important cause of health inequality is social stratification, and social stratification only varies between populations. Here, I highlight a way forward in the study of health inequality that resolves this mismatch of analytical levels: we must study the fundamental causes as…
    February 2020
    Social/Structural Determinants
  • The number of years spent in formal education is closely related to health outcomes, both amongst individuals and across populations. Equally, health status in early years and later in life affects our ability to participate in education and society. The main factor that determines both health and educational outcomes is socio-economic status. By investing in good quality, accessible education –…
    February 2020
    Early Childhood Education
  • Billions of dollars are lost annually in health research that fails to create meaningful benefits for patients. Engaging in research co-design – the meaningful involvement of end-users in research – may help address this research waste. This rapid overview of reviews addressed three related questions, namely (1) what approaches to research co-design exist in health settings? (2) What activities…
    February 2020
    Health Reform, Services & Programs
  • Effectively engaging patients in their care is essential to improve health outcomes, improve satisfaction with the care experience, reduce costs, and even benefit the clinician experience. This chapter will address the topic of patient engagement directly and review the relationships between health literacy and patient engagement. While there are many ways to define patient and family engagement…
    February 2020
    Policy and Practice
  • Large disparities in health insurance coverage and access to health services have long persisted in the US health care system. We considered how the insurance coverage expansions of the Affordable Care Act have affected disparities related to race and ethnicity. In the years since the law went into effect, insurance coverage has increased significantly for all racial/ethnic groups. Because…
    February 2020
    Policy and Practice
  • Many public and subsidized housing developments in the US are aging and in need of significant repairs. Some observers worry that their poor condition threatens the health of residents. We evaluated a recent renovation of public housing that was undertaken through the transfer of six housing developments from the New York City Housing Authority to a public-private partnership. We studied whether…
    February 2020
    Healthy Housing
  • While Connecticut ranks among the healthiest states in the country, a closer look at health data reveals major disparities by race and ethnicity – differences that result in poorer health, premature deaths, and hundreds of millions of dollars in unnecessary health care costs, according to a report from the Connecticut Health Foundation. (author introduction)
    January 2020
    Environmental/Community Health
  • To improve health equity, it is critical for health care organizations to develop strong relationships with other organizations in the community. Health care organizations can avoid reinventing the wheel by leveraging community partnerships to address social determinants of health that are beyond the direct reach of health care. The following case story is adapted from IHI’s Improving Health…
    January 2020
    Policy and Practice
  • This brief examines health disparities in Connecticut, highlighting significant differences in health outcomes by race and ethnicity. It identifies key factors contributing to these disparities, such as socioeconomic status, disparate treatment in healthcare, and the physiological effects of racism. There is also discussion of the economic costs of health disparities and provides recommendations…
    January 2020
    Social/Structural Determinants
  • Pregnancy-related deaths among American women have risen markedly over the past 30 years, despite an overall downward trend worldwide. Many of these deaths are preventable, and the risk remains three to four times higher for black women than white women at all levels of income or education. Maternal mortality—a key measure of health care quality—is typically defined as the death of a woman…
    January 2020
    Maternal Morbidity and Mortality
  • Social determinants of health—the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age that affect health and quality of life—are strongly associated with disparities in health status and life expectancy. Nurses require a comprehensive understanding of social determinants and their associations with health outcomes to provide patient-centered care. Nurses can be leaders and change…
    January 2020
    Services & Programs, Social Environment
  • The concept of sleep health provides a positive holistic framing of multiple sleep characteristics, including sleep duration, continuity, timing, alertness, and satisfaction. Sleep health promotion is an underrecognized public health opportunity with implications for a wide range of critical health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, mental health, and neurodegenerative disease.…
    January 2020
    Chronic Disease, Social/Structural Determinants
  • Recent attention to the interrelationship between racism, socioeconomic status (SES) and health has led to a small, but growing literature of empirical work on the role of structural racism in population health. Area-level racial inequities in SES are an indicator of structural racism, and the associations between structural racism indicators and self-rated health are unknown. Further, because…
    January 2020
    Social Environment, Systemic Determinants, Racism
  • This summary of the literature on Housing Instability as a social determinant of health is a narrowly defined examination that is not intended to be exhaustive and may not address all dimensions of the issue. Please note: The terminology used in each summary is consistent with the respective references. For additional information on cross-cutting topics, please see the Incarceration, …
    January 2020
    Healthy Housing
  • Effects of the minimum wage on labor market outcomes have been extensively debated and analyzed. Less studied, however, are other consequences of the minimum wage that stem from changes in a household’s income and labor supply. We examine the effects of the minimum wage on child health. To obtain estimates, we use data from the National Survey of Children’s Health in conjunction with a difference…
    January 2020
    Policy and Practice
  • There is a well-established association between income and child health. We examine the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, which provides cash assistance to low-income children with disabilities, to assess how this relationship arises. We use a large database of Medicaid administrative records to estimate the causal effects of SSI receipt on children’s health, using a regression…
    January 2020
    Maternal/Child Health, Medicaid
  • The coronavirus (COVID-19) is a massive threat to the safety of U.S. workers. Black, Indigenous, and other workers of color are particularly vulnerable, as they are overrepresented in jobs with high exposure rates, and structural racism has led to disproportionate rates of COVID-19 infection and death.COVID-19 will likely lead to a prolonged period of economic disparity and unemployment. This…
    January 2020
    COVID-19/Coronavirus, Social/Structural Determinants
  • People with higher levels of education are more likely to be healthier and live longer. Healthy People 2030 focuses on providing high-quality educational opportunities for children and adolescents — and on helping them do well in school. Children from low-income families, children with disabilities, and children who routinely experience forms of social discrimination — like bullying —  …
    January 2020
    Early Childhood Education, High School Graduation, Classism
  • Racial and ethnic health inequities have been magnified during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Linguistic barriers are a recognized source of health inequities for ethnic minority communities whose health communication needs cannot be adequately met in the majority language. Emergency circumstances, such as respiratory distress and end-of-life care, carry elevated risk of…
    January 2020
    COVID-19/Coronavirus, Communication

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