Health equity
Lance Robertson, U.S. Assistant Secretary for Aging, talked about elder abuse and health equity at a seminar and forum Thursday.
Lest “health equity” get lost in the full formal title of the event — 2018 Oklahoma Fair Housing & Health Equity Seminar and Regional Housing Forum Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — Lance Robertson hammered basics.
Robertson, an Edmond resident, has his own long title: U.S. Assistant Secretary for Aging, and administrator of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Community Living.
He formerly was director of aging services for the Oklahoma Department of Human Services for 10 years. Before that, he was 12 years at Oklahoma State University, where he co-founded the Gerontology Institute. President Donald Trump appointed him to the federal post last August. At the seminar and forum Thursday at the Oklahoma History Center, he pointed to four federal publications dating to President Barack Obama's administration in explaining health equity before drawing it into housing and community living.
• Health equity is “attainment of the highest level of health for all people,” according to “National Stakeholder Strategy for Achieving Health Equity,” a publication of the HHS Office of Minority Health. “Achieving health equity requires valuing everyone equally with focused and ongoing societal efforts to address avoidable inequalities, historical and contemporary injustices, and the elimination of health and health care disparities.”
• Health equity “is when everyone has the opportunity to 'attain their full health potential' and no one is 'disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of their social position or other socially determined circumstance,' “according to “Promoting Health Equity: A Resource to Help Communities Address Social Determinants of Health,” from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
• The opposite, health disparity, “is a health difference that is closely linked with social, economic, or environmental disadvantage,” according to HHS publication “Healthy People 2020.”
• According to the HHS “Action Plan to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities,” “Racial and ethnic minorities, and especially people whose primary language is not English, are more likely to report experiencing poorer quality patient-provider interactions than nonHispanic whites.”
The aging and disabled population are the focus of the Administration for Community Living, Robertson said, “but both of those populations are very interested in health equity and in some cases housing.”
The aim of the ACL, he said, “is to make sure that people have whatever support they need to remain in the community, so that they're not put into situations where they have to go live in an institution or some other living arrangement that isn't preferred.”
When thinking of possible solutions, Robertson said he points to the importance of meeting more basic needs that lead to social disparities.
“For instance, nutrition. We've got to make sure our fellow Oklahomans have access to good food on a regular basis. It's sad how many people are food insecure, how many people are malnourished. It's a challenge for us as Americans, certainly in Oklahoma,” he said.
Improving access to home- and communitybased services, impeded sometimes by bias in favor of institutional care that forces people from their homes, is another ACL goal, Robertson said.
Another is encouraging deeper understanding of elder abuse.
“How do we make sure that people are protected — insulated — from being victims of abuse? And I don't mean that only in the physical forms,” he said. “We have so many people that are financially exploited, who are victims of some sort of challenge that is behavioral in nature that impacts their everyday lives.”
Other areas falling under ACL's mission, Robertson said, include meeting the aging and disabled population's need for meaningful employments, not just jobs; encouraging chronic disease self-management to keep people out of institutions in order to increase longevity and quality of life; and promoting universal design in housing to keep aging people in their homes longer.