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Addressing Health-Related Social Needs Using a Social Justice Lens to Advance Health Equity
September 11, 2023, at 4:00 pm Eastern
How can health-focused funders support efforts to integrate medical and social care? How can such efforts be tailored to the needs of populations suffering from inequities due to identity (e.g., race), region (e.g., rural areas), status (e.g., undocumented), and other factors in order to promote social justice and advance health equity? Funders can play important roles in facilitating partnerships, knowledge exchange, and resource sharing between key stakeholders across sectors. Cross-sector collaboration is essential to addressing the social and structural drivers of health and health inequity (e.g., structural racism, inadequate resource availability, inequitable financing, and payment streams) across communities and health care delivery organizations.
Across public, private, and nonprofit sector partners, funders can support holistic approaches to advance health equity. Bridging the Gap: Reducing Disparities in Diabetes Care, a five-year initiative funded by the Merck Foundation, is a case exemplar of the role that funders can play in facilitating system change to advance health equity. The initiative focused on addressing diabetes-related health disparities by building holistic care systems to address individual medical and social needs and seeking policy changes that affect community resources and payment systems.
Participants learned practical approaches to supporting collaboration among health and non-health care organizations to address social drivers of health across diverse contexts, how confronting structural racism through payment reform can address social drivers of health, and how philanthropic investments can advance policy to promote greater health equity.
Moderated by Laura Gottlieb of University of California, San Francisco and Founding Co-Director of the Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network (SIREN), our speakers included Marshall Chin of the National Program Office at the University of Chicago for the Bridging the Gap: Reducing Disparities in Diabetes Care Initiative and the Chicago Center for Diabetes Translational Research; Kelly McGrath of St. Mary’s Health and Clearwater Valley Health; Monica Peek of the National Program Office at the University of Chicago for the Bridging the Gap: Reducing Disparities in Diabetes Care Initiative and the Chicago Center for Diabetes Translational Research; and Catalina Sol of La Clínica del Pueblo.