BWH Helps Launch Project to Defeat Health Disparities
BWH President Gary Gottlieb, MD, MBA joined Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino in Roxbury last month to announce three reports including a citywide blueprint to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in health care.
“We began this project two years ago when we set out to discover how BWH and the city's other great health care institutions could move forward to confront the disturbing challenge of very real differences in health outcomes among people of different ethnic backgrounds and income levels,” said Gottlieb, who co-chairs the Mayor's Task Force on Racial and Ethnic Disparities with American Red Cross of Massachusetts Bay CEO Deborah Jackson.
The disparities project “blueprint” consists of 12 comprehensive recommendations aimed at improving access to quality health care and effecting broad environmental and social changes to mitigate health care disparities. The second report from the Hospital Working Group on Racial and Ethnic Disparities offers recommendations on what hospitals can do to alleviate disparities. The third report provides a comprehensive analysis detailing how Asian, Black and Latino residents of Boston have higher rates of premature birth, obesity, diabetes and heart disease than Caucasians in Boston.
The reports are available online at www.bphc.org/disparities.