Action Guides Offer Steps Toward Health Equity
April 25, 2024, News Staff — Two new action guides give family physicians concrete steps they can take to advance health equity while providing high-quality, individualized care that improves health outcomes.
The new tools, Beyond the Surface: A Proactive Guide Series on Screening for Social Determinants of Health and The Anti-Racist Family Physician: A Guide to Making a Difference, are the latest resources from the AAFP’s EveryONE Project®. The Academy created the new action guides with support from the AAFP Foundation and Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd.
“We cannot become a healthier nation without eliminating racial inequities in health care,” note the authors of The Anti-Racist Family Physician. Although the causes of these inequities are complex, the publications lay out steps toward health equity that physicians and their care teams can put into action now.
Screening for Social Determinants of Health
Beyond the Surface leads physicians through four steps to screen for social factors that affect patients' health:
- taking a brief overview of SDOH screening;
- preparing a practice for changes based on an “ask, identify, act” framework that the authors call “the easiest approach”;
- implementing those changes with the help of tools selected for family physician practices; and
- reviewing the strengths and limitations of six screening tools.
Making a Difference
The Anti-Racist Family Physician, which offers evidence-based actions to help create practices that counter the effects of racism, begins by examining the ramifications of racism on health disparities, the practice of medicine and the medical workforce and research. It then details five strategies physicians can employ to improve both organizational practices and patient outcomes:
- reflection and education,
- determining their patient population’s specific needs,
- creating an intervention together with the population,
- measuring the intervention’s effectiveness and
- influencing policymakers and legislators.
More From the EveryONE Project
The new action guides are part of a toolkit that helps members advocate for health equity.
Earlier this year, the Academy developed a series of health policy briefs that offer evidence-based support for physician advocacy on food insecurity, gender pay inequity in medicine, considering health in all local and state policies, health literacy, housing instability, socioeconomic status and transportation.