This is Part 1 of a two-part webinar series on Injury, Violence, Health Equity & Social Justice.
An Introduction to Health Equity & Social Justice
The webinar opens with a brief introduction to health equity and social justice and their importance to public health practice, including injury and violence prevention. Prevention Institute encourages community health and health equity by facilitating a deeper collective understanding of how root causes — such as racism and poverty — shape community environments and norms which, in turn, influence outcomes for health, safety, and health equity. To learn more, download the Prevention Institute’s fact sheet, Links Between Violence and Health Equity.
Broadening the Context for Injury and Violence Prevention: A Cliff Analogy and a Gardener’s Tale
Featured speaker, Dr. Camara Jones, discussed the interconnections between health interventions, the social determinants of health, health inequity, and the mechanisms by which systems of structured inequity affect populations. Through the lens of the injury and violence prevention goals outlined by Healthy People 2020, Dr. Jones discussed how racism adversely impacts health outcomes and unfairly advantages or disadvantages specific individuals and communities. Using her celebrated article Levels of Racism: A Theoretic Framework and a Gardener’s Tale as a foundation, she offered perspectives on the relationships between race, ethnicity, social class, and health.
This is Part 2 of a two-part webinar series on Injury, Violence, Health Equity & Social Justice.
The second webinar in the 2014-2015 ASTHO-NACCHO-Safe States webinar series examined the social and political systems that generate health inequities, and showed how a local health department is working on these inequities through programs relevant to injury and violence prevention.
The Politics of Health Inequity: Public Narrative and Social Justice
Richard Hofrichter, PhD explored how racism and class exploitation are fundamental causes of health inequity, and how the dominant public narrative obscures imbalances in political power and serves to limit public health-driven solutions to programs and services instead of widespread social changes.
Taking Action to Achieve Health Equity: The Alameda County Public Health Department
Katherine Schaff, MPH discussed why the Alameda County Public Health Department (Oakland, CA) is focused on social inequities and health equity, how it promotes health equity through a comprehensive community-centered local policy agenda, and what it took to get there. She provided an overview of ACPHD’s work, including its Place Matters local policy initiative and other concrete examples of working on underlying social inequities.
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