Tag: #justice

an ambulance parked at the entrance of an emergency department

Equitable and Ethical Access to Care: The Case of Pre-Hospital Blood Administration

Stephen Wood 1 Comment

By Stephen Wood

The State of Massachusetts is currently reviewing a new protocol for the pre-hospital (i.e., ambulance) administration of blood products to patients with acute hemorrhagic shock.

In the pre-hospital setting, hemorrhagic shock, which is characterized by rapid blood loss that results in potentially fatal oxygen depletion of the vital organs, is traditionally managed by the administration of intravenous fluids. But there is a growing body of evidence spanning several decades that this is not beneficial and, in fact, can be harmful.

In the hospital setting, blood loss is treated by replacing blood, most commonly in the form of packed red blood cells, plasma, and platelets. There is strong data supporting the use of replacement blood products for the management of life-threatening hemorrhagic shock, specifically a reduction in all-cause mortality. Moreover, research has demonstrated the safety, efficacy, and feasibility of pre-hospital blood transfusion. Several states have implemented protocols for pre-hospital blood administration based on this supporting data. There are barriers, however, to initiating this practice at several regulatory and non-regulatory levels. The result is that access to a potentially life-saving intervention is inequitably distributed.

Read More

FLINT, MICHIGAN January 23, 2016: City Of Flint Water Plant Sign In Flint, January 23, 2016, Flint, Michigan.

Digging Deep to Find Community-Based Health Justice

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Melissa S. Creary

Public health interventions aimed at Black and Brown communities frequently fail to recognize that these communities have, over and over, been made sick by the systems that shape their lives.

When we fail to recognize that these problems are happening repeatedly, we are likely to address the most recent and egregious error, ignoring the systemic patterns that preceded it. Public health and technological policy responses that do not address these underlying structural and historical conditions are a form of bounded justice, i.e., a limited response sufficient to quiet critics, but inadequate to reckon with historically entrenched realities.

By only responding to the acute crisis at hand, it is impossible to attend to fairness, entitlement, and equality — the basic social and physical infrastructures underlying them have been eroded by racism.

To achieve health justice, we must move beyond bounded justice. Rather than simply recognizing the existence of underlying social determinants of health, we must do the hard work to create and re-create systems, interventions, policies, and technologies that account for that erosion and offer high-grade reinforcements.

Read More

U.S. Supreme Court

There’s No Justice Without Health Justice

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Yolonda Wilson

Last month the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the eviction moratorium issued by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The Court reasoned that, among other things, the eviction moratorium was an overreach by the CDC. That is, even in light of a global pandemic where being unhoused increases one’s risk of acute COVID-19 infection and subsequent serious illness, the Court rejected the CDC’s argument for the connection between housing justice and health justice. The Court raised several telling rhetorical questions in their decision that were intended to show the potentially troubling slippery slope that would commence if the moratorium were allowed to stand:

Could the CDC, for example, mandate free grocery delivery to the homes of the sick or vulnerable? Require manufacturers to provide free computers to enable people to work from home? Order telecommunications companies to provide free high-speed Internet service to facilitate remote work?

Whereas the Court viewed the eviction moratorium as an overreach that would lead to unthinkably absurd consequences for other sectors of social and economic life, a Black feminist conception of justice, as expressed, for example, in the historic statement of the Combahee River Collective, is necessarily grounded in a sense of the importance of community, rather than as a mere collection of individuals who may have little to no connection with or obligations to one another. Though the Court prioritized the interests of landlords and real estate agents, a Black feminist conception of justice foregrounds the needs of the overall community, such that if the well-being of the community depended on free grocery delivery to the sick and vulnerable, then so be it. The community rises and falls together, and so justice must account for the whole, not merely the well-heeled. Implicit in this conception of justice is an understanding that the community can only thrive, can only aspire to a Black feminist conception of justice, to the degree that the community is well or ill.

Read More

Emergency room.

Truth and Reconciliation in Health Care: Addressing Medical Racism using a Health Justice Framework

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Amber Johnson

Healing processes, such as the truth and reconciliation process, can operationalize the three components of the health justice framework — community empowerment, structural remediation, and financial and structural supports — to address the trauma of medical racism. Structural remediation and institutional change is a long and slow process; however, changing the way we interact with each other — through healing processes — can lead to swift, radical changes. Consider, for example, interpersonal racism in patient/provider health care interactions.

Interpersonal racism in patient/provider interaction can determine whether a patient’s needs are met, and can be the deciding factor between survival or death. From communication between a provider and a patient, to diagnosis and treatment, to follow-up care and pain management, the patient/provider interaction is integral to obtaining access to quality health care. When interpersonal racism is at play, the quality of care is substandard and health outcomes are negatively impacted.

Interpersonal racism is one aspect of patient/provider interaction(s) that has massive implications for health outcomes, and it is also one that hospitals and medical staff have the direct agency, resources, and time to change. But this must be done at least partially on an individual level — neither patients nor providers can eradicate racism without acknowledging the truth of the harm caused and healing from the harm.

Acknowledging the truth may be achieved through a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC), a process whereby parties who have been harmed and parties who have caused harm are able to share their experiences and revise ahistorical narratives, so that they reflect the truth and seek justice in the form of reconciliation, reparations, or some form of resolution.

Read More

Picture of north star in starry night sky.

Health Justice as the Lodestar of Incremental Health Reform

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Elizabeth McCuskey

Health justice is the lodestar we need for the next generation of health reform. It centers justice as the destination for health care regulation and supplies the conceptual framework for assessing our progress toward it. It does so by judging health reforms on their equitable distribution of the burdens and benefits of investments in the health care system, and their abilities to improve public health and to empower subordinated individuals and communities. Refocusing health reform on a health justice gestalt has greater urgency than ever, given the scale of injustice in our health care system and its tragic, unignorable consequences during the coronavirus pandemic.

Read More

Madison, Wisconsin / USA - April 24th, 2020: Nurses at Reopen Wisconsin Protesting against the protesters protesting safer at home order rally holding signs telling people to go home.

Safer at Home? Yes, but Not According to the Wisconsin Supreme Court

Beatrice Brown Leave a comment

By Beatrice Brown, Jane Cooper, and Danielle Pacia

Due to the Bill of Health production schedule, this piece is being published two weeks after it was written, on May 20th, 2020. The authors would like to affirm the importance of protests against anti-Black racism in America.

Stay-at-home orders—the primary means of managing the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.—face increasing opposition as protestors against these public health measures clamor for a “return to normal.” In Wisconsin, pushback against stay-at-home orders culminated in the state Supreme Court’s decision on May 13 to reverse the state’s “Safer at Home” policy.

Republican leaders of the state legislature filed suit against state Department of Health Services Secretary-designee Andrea Palm and other health officials, resulting in the case Wisconsin Legislature v. Palm. In a 4-3 ruling, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that the “Safer at Home” order was “unlawful” and “unenforceable.”  Read More

A calculator, a stethoscope, and a stack of money rest on a table.

Why Our Health Care Is Incomplete: Review of “Exposed” (Part II)

Daniel G. Aaron 2 Comments

By: Daniel Aaron

Just last month, Professor Christopher T. Robertson, at the University of Arizona College of Law, released his new book about health care, entitled Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance Is Incomplete and What Can Be Done About It. Part II of this book review offers an analytical discussion of “cost exposure,” the main subject of his book with a focus on solutions. Read Part I here.

Baby solutions

Prof. Robertson writes two chapters on solutions. In the first, titled “Fixes We Could Try,” he offers reforms, from mild to moderate, that would make cost exposure less harmful. The chapter largely retains the analytical nature of the prior chapters, but it comes across like a chapter he might have rather not written. This is evident in the following chapter’s title, “What We Must Do.” It’s also evident because some of the proposals do not seem fully considered, and in some ways appear more controversial than the more comprehensive solution offered later. Read More

A calculator, a stethoscope, and a stack of money rest on a table.

Why Our Health Care Is Incomplete: Review of “Exposed” (Part I)

Daniel G. Aaron Leave a comment

By: Daniel Aaron

Just last month, Professor Christopher T. Robertson, at the University of Arizona College of Law, released his new book about health care, entitled Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance Is Incomplete and What Can Be Done About It. This book review will offer an analytical discussion of “cost exposure,” the main subject of his book.

What is cost exposure in health care?

Cost exposure is payments people make related to their medical care. There are many ways patients pay – here are a few common ones.

  • Deductible – Patient is responsible for the first, say, $5,000 of their medical care; after this point, the health insurance kicks in. Resets each year.
  • Copay – Patient pays a specific amount, say $25, when having an episode of care.
  • Coinsurance – Patient pays a specified percentage, say 20%, of care.

Read More

“There are millions of people who are living below subsistence”: Black Panther Party Founder Bobby Seale as Public Health Activist

wendysalkin 3 Comments

By Wendy S. Salkin

Picture it: Tuesday, February 14, 2017. It is four o’clock and the Tsai Auditorium of the Center for Government and International Studies is packed to the gills, abuzz with energy. Harvard faculty, students, staff, and community members fill every seat, line the steps, and stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the back. They are turning would-be attendees away at the door. The occasion for such excitement is this: The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research here at Harvard hosted the event, “Bobby Seale in Conversation with Jim Sidanius.”

Jim Sidanius is the John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in memory of William James and of African and African American Studies. His work spans broadly across both decades and areas of inquiry. He and his co-author Felicia Pratto are famously responsible for formulating social dominance theory, “a general model of the development and maintenance of group-based social hierarchy and social oppression.” He has also pioneered work in other areas of political psychology, including such research areas as “political ideology and cognitive functioning, the political psychology of gender, group conflict, institutional discrimination and the evolutionary psychology of intergroup prejudice.”

And Bobby Seale, as you may know, co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPP). I had never before seen Bobby Seale speak and did not know what to expect. And, ultimately, I am pleased not to have watched any of his interviews in advance, as I was able to have the experience with fresh eyes. (It’s worth noting that many of his interviews and speeches are easily accessible on YouTube. It’s worth watching them, including his 2015 New York Times interview with R&B artist D’Angelo.) His energy and enthusiasm captivates his audience, as when, during his talk last week, he recited from the Declaration of Independence, and while so doing impersonated both John Wayne and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He recited this passage:

“[W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursu[ed] invariably…evinces a design to reduce [a people] under absolute Despotism, [then it is the] right [of the people]…to [alter and change that] Government, and [] provide new Guards for their future security.”

Read More

The Precision Medicine Initiative and Access

Leslie Francis Leave a comment

By Leslie Francis

Persistent differences in participation in clinical trials by race and ethnicity are well known; for example, the 2015 Report of the Working Group on Precision Medicine (PMI) relies on statistics that only 5% of clinical trial participants are African-American and only 1% are Hispanic. A recently-launched website of the FDA, “Drug Trials Snapshots,” confirms this dismal picture.

Designed to “make demographic data more available and transparent,” and to “highlight whether there were any differences in the benefits and side effects among sex, race and age groups,” the website reveals instead an impressive lack of information. Reported on the website are 70 new drug approvals for 78 different indications. These data report only evidence about differences by the census categories for race (White, Black or African-American, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and Unknown). In nine of the reported trials data were considered sufficient to report detected differences in efficacy or side-effects in all racial categories, in two data were considered sufficient to report these differences for African-Americans and Asians, in seven data were considered sufficient to report these differences for Asians, and in two data were considered sufficient to report these differences only for African-Americans. No data are reported about ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, or other categories that might be important to the PMI and the benefits data about the planned cohort might bring. Read More