Pandemic Lessons: Removing Barriers to Equitable Healthcare

11:15 a.m. - 12:05 p.m., Wednesday, September 21, 2022
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The COVID-19 pandemic afforded opportunities to celebrate heroic healthcare workers and stories of healthcare successes, including public-private partnerships that researched, treated, vaccinated, and otherwise cared for people. It also exposed and exacerbated weaknesses and inequities in the American healthcare system and, even more dramatically, across the world. The health of the U. S. citizenry is compromised by the limitations of our public health system, the tenuousness of employer-based healthcare coverage, systemic social biases that affect both patient access and outcome, and complex relationships between healthcare providers, and insurance companies, and medical researchers. Globally, problems of access are even starker, as was made evident by the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines. Addressing these problems is no easy task, particularly amidst polarizing discourse about health and healthcare. What interventions could mitigate these local and global disparities? What do all citizens need to understand about medicine, research, and public health? What questions in medicine—of trust, access, cultural literacy, or bias—need input from other perspectives, even from non-healthcare disciplines? How can community voices and advocacy efforts be incorporated into institutional planning, scientific development, or public health communication? 

Host:  Mary Ann Wood     Q&A Moderator:  Dr. Lyon Hough

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