Four papers by research faculty at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) are featured in the March/April issue of the journal Health Affairs, which focuses on racial, ethnic and other social determinants of inequalities in health status.

Findings from the papers included:

• An important cause of health disparities is that many minority children live in segregated neighborhoods with fewer resources — from education to safe recreation to choice of healthy diets — than do white children. Health gaps could be reduced by giving minority families more access to “opportunity neighborhoods.”
• Insurance coverage is lower and state variation in coverage is higher for children in immigrant families where at least one parent was a non-citizen compared to children in “all-citizen” families. The authors discuss state strategies for increasing coverage for children of immigrants, including targeted outreach and enrollment and public/private features of health care insurance reform.
• Four years after the Institute of Medicine report Unequal Treatment documented significant disparities in the rates of medical procedures by race — even when insurance status, income, age, and severity of conditions were comparable — minority populations continue to report a more negative perception of their health care than do whites.
• In a study to examine where elderly Hispanics receive hospital care, researchers found that care is extremely concentrated in a small number of U.S. hospitals that provide a modestly lower quality of care for the common medical conditions of heart attacks, congestive heart failure and pneumonia. 

The array of studies in the journal’s March/April issue represents new findings and perspectives made possible by improved data collection methods and by extending the search for causes and potential interventions into broader social dimensions.

For more information about the studies, please click here.