LibGuides: HEALWA Tutorial: Toolkit: HEALWA's Resources Regarding Race and Healthcare

Databases in HEALWA with Race and Healthcare Resources

These are databases in the HEALWA collection that contain information related to health and race, or healthcare recommendations specific to minority populations.

Dynamed is a point-of-care resource that offers access to a handful of studies regarding racial disparities and outcomes for certain health conditions among minority populations. HEALWA membership is required for full access.

Ethnomed is a collection of resources that integrates cultural information into clinical practice. The website intends to provide cultural context when working with immigrants and refugees, particularly in King County. It is also an entree to “cross-cultural” practice. Ethnomed provides information about immigration, cultural norms and values, experience with Western medicine, culture specific information and tools pertinent to the clinical encounter, and translated/culturally tailored information for patients. It can be accessed through HEALWA.org, but is available to all without HEALWA membership.

Medline Plus is a service of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world's largest medical library, which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Their mission is to present high-quality, relevant health and wellness information that is trusted, easy to understand, and free of advertising, in both English and Spanish. Specific resources are devoted to the health of African Americans, American Indian and Alaska Natives, Asian Americans, GLBTQ individuals, Hispanic Americans, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders. It can be accessed through HEALWA.org, but is available to all without HEALWA membership.

To access health information by language (including Albanian, Hmong, Marshallese, Urdu, Yiddish, and more), click here.
To access health information in multiple languages by health topic (from "Abortion" to "Zika Virus"), click here.

SocINDEX is the authoritative bibliographic database for sociology research. It offers millions of indexed records from top sociology journals covering many studies including gender studies, criminal justice, social psychology, racial studies, religion and social work. HEALWA membership is required for full access.

Other Online Resources

All of Us is a research program from the National Institutes of Health. It is seeking one million or more people from across the U.S. to help speed up medical research, and in particular is searching for people less likely to be represented in scientific studies, like minority populations. People who join will share information about their health, habits, and what it’s like where they live. By looking for patterns, researchers will learn more about what affects people’s health.

National Institute on Minority Health and Disparities from the NIH. NIMHD’s mission is to lead scientific research to improve minority health and reduce health disparities. This website includes information about programs, funding opportunities, and resources. For insights from NIMHD leaders, check out the NIMHD blog.

Washington Health Alliance Disparities in Care Report. The groups most likely to receive less effective and evidence-based care include ethnic and racial minorities, women, children or the elderly, or persons with disabilities. The purpose of this report is to help providers who serve Medicaid populations in Washington State better understand potential disparities within their practice and help them identify both areas of improvement and successes that can be replicated.

Health Equity Information from the Washington State Department of Health.

Washington Tracking Network, a source for environmental public health data and environmental disparities in Washington State.

"Healthy People" from the Office of Disease Prevention and Promotion provides information regarding disparities in health across US populations.

"Addressing Implicit Bias in Women's Health" from Georgetown School of Nursing and Health Studies takes a look at the ways women’s chronic pain conditions sometimes go untreated because of medical bias, how that contributes to health disparities, what providers are doing to address gender bias in healthcare, and how patients are learning to advocate for themselves.

Scholarly Works on Race and Healthcare

These are books outside the HEALWA collection that focus on healthcare and race. Some of them are available as ebooks. To access these texts through a library you're affiliated with, click on their titles.

Blood Sugar by Anthony Ryan Hatch
ISBN: 9780816696178
Publication Date: 2016-04-10
Why do African Americans have exceptionally high rates of hypertension, diabetes, and obesity? Is it their genes? Their disease-prone culture? Their poor diets? Such racist explanations for racial inequalities in metabolic health have circulated in medical journals for decades. Blood Sugar analyzes and challenges the ways in which "metabolic syndrome" has become a major biomedical category that medical researchers have created to better understand the risks high blood pressure, blood sugar, body fat, and cholesterol pose to people. An estimated sixty million Americans are well on the way to being diagnosed with it, many of them belonging to people of color. Anthony Ryan Hatch argues that the syndrome represents another, very real crisis and that its advent signals a new form of "colorblind scientific racism"--a repackaging of race within biomedical and genomic research. Examining the cultural discussions and scientific practices that target human metabolism of prescription drugs and sugar by African Americans, he reveals how medical researchers who use metabolic syndrome to address racial inequalities in health have in effect reconstructed race as a fixed, biological, genetic feature of bodies--without incorporating social and economic inequalities into the equation. And just as the causes of metabolic syndrome are framed in racial terms, so are potential drug treatments and nutritional health interventions. The first sustained social and political inquiry of metabolic syndrome, this provocative and timely book is a crucial contribution to the emerging literature on race and medicine. It will engage those who seek to understand how unjust power relations shape population health inequalities and the production of medical knowledge and biotechnologies.
Caring for Equality by David McBride
ISBN: 9781442260597
Publication Date: 2018-08-24
African Americans today continue to suffer disproportionately from heart disease, diabetes, and other health problems. In Caring for Equality David McBride chronicles the struggle by African Americans and their white allies to improve poor black health conditions as well as inadequate medical care--caused by slavery, racism, and discrimination--since the arrival of African slaves in America. Black American health progress resulted from the steady influence of what David McBride calls the health equality ideal: the principle that health of black Americans could and should be equal to that of whites and other Americans. Including a timeline, selected primary sources, and an extensive bibliographic essay, McBride's book provides a superb starting point for students and readers who want to explore in greater depth this important and understudied topic in African American history.
Just Medicine by Dayna Bowen Matthew
ISBN: 9781479851621
Publication Date: 2018-07-05
Offers an innovative plan to eliminate inequalities in the American health care and save the lives they endanger Over 84,000 black and brown lives are needlessly lost each year due to health disparities: the unfair, unjust, and avoidable differences between the quality and quantity of health care provided to Americans who are members of racial and ethnic minorities and care provided to whites. Health disparities have remained stubbornly entrenched in the American health care system--and in Just Medicine Dayna Bowen Matthew finds that they principally arise from unconscious racial and ethnic biases held by physicians, institutional providers, and their patients. Implicit bias is the single most important determinant of health and health care disparities. Because we have missed this fact, the money we spend on training providers to become culturally competent, expanding wellness education programs and community health centers, and even expanding access to health insurance will have only a modest effect on reducing health disparities. We will continue to utterly fail in the effort to eradicate health disparities unless we enact strong, evidence-based legal remedies that accurately address implicit and unintentional forms of discrimination, to replace the weak, tepid, and largely irrelevant legal remedies currently available. Our continued failure to fashion an effective response that purges the effects of implicit bias from American health care, Matthew argues, is unjust and morally untenable. In this book, she unites medical, neuroscience, psychology, and sociology research on implicit bias and health disparities with her own expertise in civil rights and constitutional law. In a time when the health of the entire nation is at risk, it is essential to confront the issues keeping the health care system from providing equal treatment to all.
Black Mental Health by Ezra E. H. Griffith (Editor); Billy E. Jones (Editor); Altha J. Stewart (Editor)
ISBN: 9781615372102
Publication Date: 2018-11-23
Novel in its approach and unique in its scope, Black Mental Health: Patients, Providers, and Systems examines the role of African Americans within American psychiatric health care from distinct but interconnected perspectives. The experiences of both black patients and the black mental health professionals who serve them are analyzed against the backdrop of the cultural, societal, and professional forces that have shaped their place in this specialized health care arena. The volume opens with the singular, first-person accounts of five senior black psychiatrists -- including Dr. Altha J. Stewart, president of the American Psychiatric Association -- who describe their individual journeys to the top of their field, not shying away from discussing the racism and discrimination that have challenged their paths to leadership. The book's second part focuses on the complexities of and opportunities for delivering mental health care to various subsets of the African American population, including children, women, elderly patients, and LGBTQ individuals. System design strategies, biological therapies, and church-based mental health promotion initiatives are all considered as methods for reducing racial and ethnic disparities in access to effective treatment. Part III examines the training of black mental health professionals and their representation in psychiatry, particularly in the face of discrimination and implicit bias. A chapter on historically black colleges and universities discusses the importance of their role in the delivery of psychiatric services and research development for African Americans. The fourth part builds on this discussion, addressing research that is relevant to the care of the black population. A concluding chapter highlights the key themes that emerged from each of the previous four parts, providing a holistic view of the place of black patients and providers in American psychiatry. With its blend of scholarship, clinical insight, and training analysis, Black Mental Health is compulsory reading both for trainees -- as care delivery to minority groups is of ever greater importance -- and practicing clinicians, who will glean useful information from the chapters on research advances and treatment modalities. Additionally, policy makers, educators, and historians, among others, will gain a better understanding of the challenges and necessity of developing integrated approaches to the care of nondominant groups.
Healthcare and Human Dignity by Frank M. McClellan
ISBN: 9781978802957
Publication Date: 2019-12-13
The individual and structural biases that affect the American healthcare system have serious emotional and physical consequences that all too often go unseen. These biases are often rooted in power, class, racial, gender or sexual orientation prejudices, and as a result, the injured parties usually lack the resources needed to protect themselves. In Healthcare and Human Dignity, individual worth, equality, and autonomy emerge as the dominant values at stake in encounters with doctors, nurses, hospitals, and drug companies. Although the public is aware of legal battles over autonomy and dignity in the context of death, the everyday patient's need for dignity has received scant attention. Thus, in Healthcare, law professor Frank McClellan's collection of cases and individual experiences bring these stories to life and establish beyond doubt that human dignity is of utmost priority in the everyday process of healthcare decision making.
Medicine Unbundled by Gary Geddes
ISBN: 9781772031652
Publication Date: 2017-02-15
A shocking exposé of the dark history and legacy of segregated Indigenous health care in Canada. After the publication of his critically acclaimed 2011 book Drink the Bitter Root: A Writer's Search for Justice and Healing in Africa, author Gary Geddes turned the investigative lens on his own country, embarking on a long and difficult journey across Canada to interview Indigenous elders willing to share their experiences of segregated health care, including their treatment in the "Indian hospitals" that existed from coast to coast for over half a century. The memories recounted by these survivors--from gratuitous drug and surgical experiments to electroshock treatments intended to destroy the memory of sexual abuse--are truly harrowing, and will surely shatter any lingering illusions about the virtues or good intentions of our colonial past. Yet, this is more than just the painful history of a once-so-called vanishing people (a people who have resisted vanishing despite the best efforts of those in charge); it is a testament to survival, perseverance, and the power of memory to keep history alive and promote the idea of a more open and just future. Released to coincide with the Year of Reconciliation (2017), Medicine Unbundled is an important and timely contribution to our national narrative.
Handbook of Asian American Health by Grace J. Yoo (Editor); Mai-Nhung Le (Editor); Alan Y. Oda (Editor)
ISBN: 9781493913442
Publication Date: 2014-06-05
Asian Americans encounter a range of health issues often unknown to the American public, policy makers, researchers and even clinicians. National research often combines Asian Americans into a single category, not taking into account the differences and complexity among Asian ethnic subgroups. The definition of Asian American derives from the U.S. Census Bureau's definition of Asian, which includes peoples from all the vast territories of the Far East, Southeast Asia and the South Asian Subcontinent. While Census classifications determine demographic measurements that affect equal opportunity programs, the broad rubric "Asian-American" can never describe accurately the more than 50 distinct Asian American subgroups, who together comprise multifaceted diversity across cultural ethnicities, socio-economic status, languages, religions and generations. This volume rectifies that situation by exploring the unique needs and health concerns of particular subgroups within the Asian American community. It consolidates a wide range of knowledge on various health issues impacting Asian Americans while also providing a discussion into the cultural, social, and structural forces impacting morbidity, mortality and quality of life. The volume is designed to advance the understanding of Asian American health by explaining key challenges and identifying emerging trends faced in specific ethnic groups and diseases/illnesses, innovative community-based interventions and the future needed areas of research.
Unequal Treatment by Institute of Medicine Staff; Board on Health Sciences Policy Staff; Understanding and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care Committee; Alan R. Nelson (Editor); Adrienne Y. Stith (Editor); Brian D. Smedley (Editor)
ISBN: 9780309085328
Publication Date: 2002-11-02
Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients (TM) and providers (TM) attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider "patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.
Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan M. Metzl
ISBN: 9781541644960
Publication Date: 2019-03-05
A physician reveals how right-wing backlash policies have mortal consequences -- even for the white voters they promise to help Named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Esquire and the Boston Globe In the era of Donald Trump, many lower- and middle-class white Americans are drawn to politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as Dying of Whiteness shows, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death. Physician Jonathan M. Metzl's quest to understand the health implications of "backlash governance" leads him across America's heartland. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, he examines how racial resentment has fueled progun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. And he shows these policies' costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates. White Americans, Metzl argues, must reject the racial hierarchies that promise to aid them but in fact lead our nation to demise.
Eliminating Healthcare Disparities in America by Richard Allen Williams (Editor)
ISBN: 9781597454858
Publication Date: 2007-12-22
In this book, Dr. Richard Allen Williams has assembled the very best scholars on healthcare disparities to raise the public consciousness of this issue. Arranged into discrete categories, this volume contains comprehensive coverage, both historical and current, of the healthcare disparity crisis currently plaguing our country in hopes of leading us all to a brighter future.
The Racial Divide in American Medicine by Richard D. deShazo (Editor)
ISBN: 9781496817686
Publication Date: 2018-07-30
Contributions by Richard D. deShazo, John Dittmer, Keydron K. Guinn, Lucius M. Lampton, Wilson F. Minor, Rosemary Moak, Sara B. Parker, Wayne J. Riley, Leigh Baldwin Skipworth, Robert Smith, and William F. Winter The Racial Divide in American Medicine documents the struggle for equity in health and health care by African Americans in Mississippi and the United States and the connections between what happened there and the national search for social justice in health care. Dr. Richard D. deShazo and the contributors to the volume trace the dark journey from a system of slave hospitals in the state, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights era, to the present day. They substantiate that current health disparities are directly linked to America's history of separation, neglect, struggle, and disparities. Contributors reveal details of individual physicians' journeys for recognition both as African Americans and as professionals in Mississippi. Despite discrimination by their white colleagues and threats of violence, a small but fearless group of African American physicians fought for desegregation of American medicine and society. For example, T. R. M. Howard, MD, in the all-black city of Mound Bayou led a private investigation of the Emmett Till murder that helped trigger the civil rights movement. Later, other black physicians risked their lives and practices to provide care for white civil rights workers during the civil rights movement. DeShazo has assembled an accurate account of the lives and experiences of black physicians in Mississippi, one that gives full credit to the actions of these pioneers. DeShazo's introduction and the essays address ongoing isolation and distrust among black and white colleagues. This book will stimulate dialogue, apology, and reconciliation, with the ultimate goal of improving disparities in health and health care and addressing long-standing injustices in our country.
On Race and Medicine by Richard Garcia (Editor)
ISBN: 9781442248359
Publication Date: 2015-04-22
Health disparities exist between races in America. These inequalities are cataloged in numerous studies, reports, conferences, articles, seminars, and keynote speeches. Various studies include reports on income, health insurance, cultural differences between patients and their physicians, language barriers, and biological "racial" differences in the discourse of health disparities. On Race and Medicine: Insider Perspectives is a collection of enlightening personal essays written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, physicians, and medical school deans. They invite readers to evaluate disparities differently when considering race in American healthcare. They address the very real, everyday circumstances of healthcare differences where race is concerned, and shine light on the realities of race itself, inequalities in healthcare, and on the very way these American complexities can be discussed and considered. This is not another chronicle of studies cataloging differences in health care based on race. The essays are narrated from practical and personal stances examining disparate health between the races. Decreasing inequalities in health for racial minorities, who are sicker in so many areas--diabetes, heart disease, stage of cancer, etc.--is financially good for everyone. But understanding health inequalities in race is of even greater human importance. How race intersects with medicine is striking given the existence of racial issues throughout the rest of American history. These authors attempt to explain and explore the truth about health disparities, which is necessary before we can turn our national attention toward eliminating differences in health based on race.
The Inequality and African-American Health by Shirley A. Hill
ISBN: 9781447322825
Publication Date: 2016-10-05
This book reveals how living in a highly racialized society affects health through multiple social contexts, including neighborhoods, personal and family relationships, and the medical system. Black-white disparities in health, illness, and mortality have been widely documented, but most research has focused on single factors that produce and perpetuate those disparities, such as individual health behaviors and access to medical care. Inequality and African-American Health is the first book to offer a comprehensive perspective on health and sickness among African Americans. Starting with an examination of how race has been historically constructed in the United States generally and in its medical system specifically, it goes on to explore the resilience of these racial ideologies and practices. Shirley A. Hill shows that racial disparities in health reflect racial inequalities in living conditions, incarceration rates, family systems, and opportunities and that these racial disparities often cut across social class boundaries and have gender-specific consequences. Bringing together data from existing quantitative and qualitative research with new archival and interview research, this book marks a crucial advance in the fields of family studies, race and ethnicity studies, and medical sociology.
Real Nurses and Others by Tania Das Gupta
ISBN: 9781552662984
Publication Date: 2009-09-01
Based on a recent survey of more than 500 Ontario Nursing Association members, this study demonstrates how racism impacts working relations in the nursing profession. Gender and class concepts are explored as well as how fear, lack of support, management collaboration, and ineffective institutional responses make it difficult for victims to fight back. Dealing with the concept of racism within the frameworks of human rights legislation and the political economy of health care, this reference illustrates its causes in detail, providing a foundation from which nurses and other workers can combat racial harassment.
Race, Ethnicity, and Health by Thomas A. LaVeist (Editor); Lydia A. Isaac (Editor)
ISBN: 9781118049082
Publication Date: 2012-10-16
Race, Ethnicity and Health, Second Edition, is a new and critical selection of hallmark articles that address health disparities in America. It effectively documents the need for equal treatment and equal health status for minorities. Intended as a resource for faculty and students in public health as well as the social sciences, it will be also be valuable to public health administrators and frontline staff who serve diverse racial and ethnic populations. The book brings together the best peer reviewed research literature from the leading scholars and faculty in this growing field, providing a historical and political context for the study of health, race, and ethnicity, with key findings on disparities in access, use, and quality. This volume also examines the role of health care providers in health disparities and discusses the issue of matching patients and doctors by race. There has been considerable new research since the original manuscript's preparation in 2001 and publication in 2002, and reflecting this, more than half the book is new content. New chapters cover: reflections on demographic changes in the US based on the current census; metrics and nomenclature for disparities; theories of genetic basis for disparities; the built environment; residential segregation; environmental health; occupational health; health disparities in integrated communities; Latino health; Asian populations; stress and health; physician/patient relationships; hospital treatment of minorities; the slavery hypertension hypothesis; geographic disparities; and intervention design.
Invisible Visits by Tina K. Sacks
ISBN: 9780190840204
Publication Date: 2019-01-31
Although the United States spends almost one-fifth of all its resources funding healthcare, the American system continues to be dogged by persistent inequities in the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities and women. Invisible Visits analyzes how middle-class Black women navigate thecomplexities of dealing with doctors in this environment. It challenges the idea that race and gender discrimination - particularly in healthcare settings - is a thing of the past, and questions the persistent myth that discrimination only affects poor racial minorities. In so doing, the bookexpands our understanding of how Black middle-class women are treated when they go to the doctor, why they continue to face inequities in securing proper medical care, and what strategies they use to fight for the best treatment (as well as the consequential toll on their health).Based on original research, the author shines a light on how women perceive the persistently negative stereotypes that follow them into the exam room, and proceeds to illustrate that simply providing more cultural-competency or anti-bias training to doctors will not be enough to overcome theproblem. For Americans to truly address these challenges, the deeply embedded discrimination in our prized institutions - including those in the healthcare sector - must be acknowledged.

Libraries

HEALWA Tutorial

A note on these resources

Databases in HEALWA with Race and Healthcare Resources

Other Online Resources

Scholarly Works on Race and Healthcare