Research In Practice Blog
Background
Pediatric health systems often serve patients whose health journey requires more than just medical care. Many patients and families, particularly those from low-income and minoritized backgrounds, may benefit from additional services and supports to ensure they are able to keep their children healthy. These supports can take the form of social care interventions addressing a vast array of health-related social needs. For example, health systems might provide families with help paying for transportation to medical appointments, help accessing nutritious food, housing assistance and help making environmental modifications within their homes, financial assistance including help with financial planning, tax preparation, and connection to benefits, assistance paying electricity, heat, or water bills, and more.
Providing social care is a significant step toward health equity, but how social care is provided also impacts social risk and health inequity. Clinical Futures’ Aditi Vasan, MD, MSHP and George Dalembert, MD, MSHP, conceptualized an antiracist framework for pediatric health systems to use in shaping and refining their social care programs and policies.
The Antiracist Approach to Social Care
Many minoritized families are unable to fully benefit from models of care offered by health systems due to circumstances that originate from structural and systemic racism. Access to health care, and therefore, to health system based social needs screening and support programs, is sometimes exclusionary and inequitable, which can render important support services inaccessible to those with the greatest needs. The authors explain how health systems can mitigate the effects of structural racism, institutional racism, and interpersonal and internalized racism by designing social care models through an antiracist framework:
They stress the importance of considering contributors to racial inequity when designing and implementing social care programs. And, they predict that health outcomes will improve for minoritized children, families, and communities when these factors are recognized and addressed.
Read the full article in Pediatrics.
Additional Information & Resources:
- Mandates and Incentives to Support Social Needs Screening-Challenges and Opportunities
- Creating Healing-Centered Health Systems by Reimagining Social Needs Screening and Supports
- How health systems can truly value Black lives: help close the racial wealth gap
- Why Add “Abolition” to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Social Care Framework?
Clinical Futures author(s): Aditi Vasan, MD, MS and George Dalembert, MD, MS