Two different news items popped up in the last day or two...The first was a finding that ethnic minorities are more likely to have rate their healthcare as fair/poor and report a negative interaction with a doctor (RWJ summary, Health Affairs full text). I don't know how surprising this is to anyone who has done research in this area, of course. The IOM has a great report summarizing health disparities in its book Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. It includes research on how interpersonal, cultural, and institutional factors lead to health disparities, as well as directions for policy and research to work on eliminating these disparities.
The other article I found to be interesting was over at Advertising Age, reporting on a children's hospital that is coming under fire after accepting donations from major corporations - resulting in the Abercrombie & Fitch Emergency Department and Trauma Center. As hospitals and other healthcare providers come under increasing pressures to reduce costs and raise funds, is this more likely to happen? And I have to wonder what the backlash would (or wouldn't) be if there was a tighter link between the center/department being branded and the company doing the advertising... Perhaps a more logical link between the two wouldn't cause quite the uproar that this is?
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