What is Health Equity?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, health equity is the “state in which everyone has a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health.” The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation adds that “This requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, powerlessness, and their consequences — including lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, safe environments, and quality education, housing, and health care. For the purposes of measurement, health equity means reducing and ultimately eliminating disparities in health and its determinants that adversely affect excluded or marginalized groups.” Unfortunately, despite broad national efforts such as Healthy People 2030, we know all too well that significant barriers exist in the U.S. to achieving health equity that are often referred to as the social and structural determinants of health. These determinants differentially advantage and disadvantage groups of people by race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation and other characteristics leading to discrimination that can be found in social and health care systems.
The Health Equity Collaborative
The Health Equity Collaborative in the UCI College of Health Science was founded in fall 2023 after a two-year work group recommended a focus on implementation of strategies to achieve health equity across Health Affairs, including the college, UCI Health, and the UCI Centers and Institutes of Health. This collaborative is composed of representatives from the schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences, and public health along with the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute, UCI Health, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs. Our mission is to promote health equity for the patients and communities we serve. We foresee achieving this through leveraging existing efforts, striving for organizational change, engaging the community, and making health equity research and teaching more accessible. These efforts will build trust and mutual respect within schools and the health system, and to create opportunities to engage together in learning and growing COHS’ health equity efforts.
Current efforts include increasing understanding of health equity implementation best practices across the college, and partnering with the Interprofessional Education and Practice Collaborative to facilitate the planning of environmental health projects among health professional graduate students.
Health Equity Collaborative Members
Past Members
Emilie Chow, MD
Health Sciences Clinical Professor, School of Medicine
Served 2023-24
