Join the Health Equity Interest Group for a webinar highlighting strategies to integrate health equity language into research, advocacy, and writing.
Join the Health Equity Interest Group for a webinar highlighting strategies to integrate health equity language into research, advocacy, and writing. Science communication and health policy language often inadequately define and contextualize systemic barriers-like structural racism and wealth inequity-that contribute to disparities in health outcomes. As no perfect term exists, adopting health equity language principles can help health policy practitioners avoid dehumanizing and exclusionary language as well as ill-suited terminology that perpetuates racist systems and leads to inequities in population health.
Our speakers will present six guiding principles to dismantle systems that work against the goals of health equity through policy-focused research, writing, and communications. These principles include avoiding blaming language, contextualizing health inequities, acknowledging that systems are not passive, understanding that one-size-fits-all terminology does not exist, seeking input from community members, and paying attention to omissions. These principles were recently published in the Milbank Quarterly. Our speakers will also discuss why language choice is important in health policy, focusing on experiences in North Carolina.
By the conclusion of this webinar, participants will:
Moderator:
Rachel Harrington, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Scientist at the National Committee for Quality Assurance, where she leads organizational efforts to build an evidence base to advance equitable, high quality, health care. Read Bio
Speakers:
Andrea Thoumi, M.P.P., MSc is a doctoral student at the Department of Population Health Sciences, Duke University. Read Bio
Kamaria Kaalund is a first-year doctoral student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Health Policy and Management program. Read Bio
Yazmin Garcia Rico, Director of Community Engagement and Impact, joined the Foundation in May 2024. Throughout her career, she has been a tireless advocate for the Hispanic/Latinx and historically marginalized populations in North Carolina through different roles in the nonprofit, health, and government sector. Read Bio