HELEN News

Dismantling barriers Another keynote speaker, Daniel Dawes, called CHA's equity pledge "one of the boldest calls to action that I have seen." Dawes is director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine and is its associate lead for government relations. He's also an author whose newest book, The Political Determinants of Health, addresses the question of how policy and politics influence the social conditions that generate health outcomes. Dawes said that the social determinants of health in communities, such as economic stability and access to health care, can be traced back to political decisions. "Simply stated, the nation's health is…

Authored by: Kyle R. MacDonald, Danielle Barrasse, and Myrela Bauman Posted: June 28, 2021 In public health, much of our work depends on having accurate data, so we know what’s happening both on the ground and at a population level. Unfortunately, in many cases data has erased diversity by collapsing distinct groups of people into “convenient” categories for statistical purposes. This erasure frequently occurs when people from across the Americas are all labeled as Hispanic/Latinx, when hundreds of distinct tribal communities are all coded as American Indian, or when everyone who is not cis-gender or heterosexual is grouped together as LGBTQ+. Sometimes these groupings…

Josh (@DrJIsrael) and Brian (@bchiglinsky) are joined by Daniel Dawes (@DanielEDawes), the Director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. He is a professor of health law, policy and management and author. They discuss the long and challenging history of efforts in America to promote equity in health care and why it’s so important to have good data to make meaningful improvements to health inequity https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/103-150-years-of-obamacare/id1438675671?i=1000526250680

Honoring Juneteenth Juneteenth is more than just a celebration of freedom.  It represents long-standing hope and promise of change to come.  Since the reading of General Order Number 3 by General Gordon Granger in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865, to the present day, Juneteenth recognitions possess an air of joy and achievement while remembering the struggle of a people who could only hold on to the hope of freedom and better times. This past week’s passage of the “Juneteenth National Independence Day Act,” designating Juneteenth as a legal public holiday marks a culture shift in how our society recognizes slavery’s place in the history of our…

A NEW TRACKER HIGHLIGHTS THE RACIAL DISPARITIES—AND THE MISSING DATA—IN AMERICA’S COVID-19 OUTBREAKS Betsy LadyzhetsFederal dataCDC, federal data, interview, race & ethnicity data, race dataLeave a comment Screenshot of the Health Equity Tracker showing which states are missing race and ethnicity data for COVID-19 cases.  Two weeks ago, a major new COVID-19 data source came on the scene: the Health Equity Tracker, developed by the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine. This tracker incorporates data from the CDC, the Census, and other sources to provide comprehensive information on which communities have been…