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How cultural humility is central to build trust between medical providers and their patients in CT
Cris Villalonga-Vivoni, CT Insider, Jan. 22
When Ruth Gomez first met the staff at the Child and Family Guidance Center in Bridgeport, she was guarded. Seeking help for her son Casper, who had been experiencing behavioral health issues at school, she worried that the experience would be like others in the past, which left them frustrated and still in need of help. However, she says both her life and her son’s life have been changed by the staff who used cultural humility to build trust between them. To the center’s president and CEO Michael Patota, cultural humility means providers set aside their biases, prejudices, and world experiences and actively listen to their patient’s stories to better meet their medical and social needs.
Online therapy boom has mainly benefited privileged groups, studies find
Ellen Barry, The New York Times, Jan. 15
The number of Americans receiving psychotherapy increased by 30 percent during the pandemic, as virtual sessions replaced in-person appointments. New research shows that rather than this technology making mental health care more accessible to the neediest populations, it is exacerbating existing disparities. Researchers found that the increase in psychotherapy has occurred in groups that already enjoyed more access: people in higher-income brackets, living in cities, with steady employment and more education. Children from low-income families, Black children and adolescents, and adults with “serious psychological distress” are among those who have not benefited from this increase.
Q&A: Why physicians struggle to care for patients with disability
Timmy Broderick, STAT News, Jan. 16
A new paper in the Journal of General Internal Medicine looks into how physicians are trained to care for what it refers to as “the forgotten minority:” people with disabilities. The study’s author says people with disabilities experience disparities in access to health care, in quality of health care, and in the safety of their health care. “Despite knowing this for many years — for decades, in fact — there’s been very little movement to address these inequities in care,” said Carol Haywood, an assistant professor in medical social sciences at Northwestern University.
The growing inequality in life expectancy among Americans
Amy Maxmen, KFF Health News, Jan. 18
A new study shows that the disparity between the life expectancies of different populations in the U.S. has nearly doubled since 2000. The average life expectancy of many American Indians and Alaska Natives has been steadily shrinking. In the past decade, the same has been true for Black people in low-income counties in the southeastern U.S. Research shows that the conditions of people’s lives and their environments heavily influence why some populations are at higher risk than others. “As long as we have these really severe disparities, we’re going to have this very low life expectancy,” said Kathleen Harris, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina.
This hospital improved moms’ health by focusing on more than medicine
Jenna Portnoy, The Washington Post, Jan. 21
A program called Safe Babies Safe Moms, offered at Washington D.C.’s MedStar Washington Hospital Center, offers dozens of services to mothers and infants that providers hope can improve Black maternal and infant health. A case study on the program found that it devoted as much attention to patients’ medical needs as their social needs, from nutritious food to safe housing, with promising results. Black patients in the program were less likely to have babies with very low or low birth weight or preterm births than Black or white patients who received prenatal care elsewhere.