Racial Disparity In Health Care

Discrimination can cause adverse changes in health, and such efforts are an increasingly necessary component of comprehensive approaches to improving health disparities. The research on discrimination and health disparities continues to grow rapidly year after year, and evidence has shown that discrimination has been operationalized in a variety of ways, consistent with an inverse association between discrimination and an increasingly broad range of health outcomes across various populations in a wide range of cultural and national contexts. It lends credibility to the likelihood of perceived discrimination as a significant emerging risk factor for disease. The health care system in the United States has a history of racial discrimination that
These experiences are thought to set into motion a process of physiological responses (e.g., elevated blood pressure and heart rate, and so on…) that eventually result in chronic diseases and mortality. Perceived racial or ethnic discrimination is one aspect of racism that is increasingly receiving empirical attention as a class of stressors that could have consequences for health and for understanding disparities in health. Researchers continues to document an inverse association between discrimination and health disparities. Discrimination, in its multiple forms, is rapidly emerging as a major risk factor for health disparities. These patterns are now evident in a wider range of contexts and for a broader array of outcomes. Gender is another social variable that might affect the relationship between discrimination and health. With that said, research on discrimination and health should also attend to the personal & situational factors that might affect the underlying processes as social factors can affect the prevalence and the impact of the