Health Outcomes

Health Outcomes

Our program supports and develops policies to improve health outcomes.  To Greenlining, health is more than just the absence of disease, it's about health workforce diversity, education, community investment, and our environment.  All these things impact the well being of all communities.

Greenlining conducts research, trains new leaders, and builds coalitions and public-private partnerships to educate stakeholders on how improve access to care and mitigate health disparities.

Class implications on health:

• Lower socioeconomic status limits access to social power, which limits inclusion in the political decision-making process.
• The poorer you are, the less access you will have to products and services, such as medicine and gym memberships, that directly affect your well-being.[1]
• The lower your socioeconomic status, the more likely you are to be sick and to die earlier.  

Socioeconomic differences do not entirely explain racial disparities in health, however...

Race implications on health:

• Multiple studies have shown that within each income or education level, Blacks have worse health compared with Whites.
• Perceived racism, structural discrimination, and social scapegoating leads to more stress.
• Even with health care access factors such as income and insurance taken into consideration, people of color are disproportionately more likely to receive lower quality care than their White counterparts and less likely to receive routine medical procedures.[2]

Greenlining is working to ensure equal and positive health outcomes for underrepresented of color and low income communities. We aim to:

• Increase diversity within the health workforce.
• Improve corporate social responsibility and develop private-public partnerships within the healthcare industry to increase:

• Supplier diversity;
• Diversity of health corporation CEOs, board members, and management staff;
• Philanthropy within these companies; and
• Transparency and accountability through regulation.

• Improve the overall health outcomes of communities disproportionately harmed by pollution and global warming.
• Develop young leaders to act as champions for health policy issues in their communities.

[1] MG Marmot, MJ Shipley, and G. Rose, (1984), Inequalities in death-specific explanations of a general pattern? Lancet; 1(8384):1003-6.

[2] BD Smedley, AY Stith, AR Nelson, eds. (2002), in: Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, A Report of the Institute of Medicine, Washington, DC: National Academy Press.