Equity in Health
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
- C. S. Lewis
Recently, we talked with a group of leaders about inclusion and equity, asking them to think about system, behavior/culture and individual levels. Where does the problem lie?
At Ascent, we’ve been posing questions like this for some time, supporting leaders in growing the capacity and understanding that they need to make critical change. In the coming weeks, we will share research and resources to guide organizations looking to understand and respond to systemic bias and inequity.
We’re proud to share this article, “Understanding the Role of Past Health Care Discrimination in Help-Seeking and Shared Decision-Making for Depression Treatment Preferences,” whose authors include Ziva Mann, Ascent’s Director of Assessment and Development.
A note from Ziva:
It should come as no surprise that bias has an impact on how – or if – people engage with an individual, a process, a system. This article describes a small part of the project, which worked to map some of the ways that bias in healthcare has an impact on patients. While the work itself was valuable, one of the great pleasures of this project was in its design. The lead researcher, Benjamin Lê Cook, director of the Health Equity Research Lab at Cambridge Health Alliance, chose to use community based participatory research for this project, engaging healthcare providers as well as patients - the people affected by the issue - as full partners in studying the problem. Too often, organizations can assess a problem from above, without asking those who are experiencing it. This project was designed precisely to avoid the power dynamics that lead to some of healthcare’s core challenges, and to offer respect to those who’d been harmed by it. It is my opinion that the team’s work was the richer for that choice.
About the Health Equity Research Lab: https://www.healthequityresearch.org/
About community based participatory research: https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.2018.05040