The Health Equity Interest Group hosted a webinar that highlighted strategies for integrating health equity language into research, advocacy, and writing.
The Health Equity Interest Group hosted a webinar that highlighted strategies for integrating health equity language into research, advocacy, and writing. Science communication and health policy language have often failed to adequately define and contextualize systemic barriers—such as structural racism and wealth inequity—that contribute to disparities in health outcomes. While no perfect term exists, applying health equity language principles can help policy practitioners avoid dehumanizing or exclusionary language and prevent the use of terms that reinforce racist systems and worsen inequities in population health.
Speakers shared six guiding principles to help dismantle systems that undermine health equity through policy-focused research, writing, and communications. These principles included avoiding blaming language, contextualizing health inequities, acknowledging that systems are not passive, recognizing that one-size-fits-all terminology does not exist, seeking input from community members, and being mindful of omissions. These principles were recently published in the Milbank Quarterly. The speakers also discussed the importance of language choice in health policy, drawing from experiences in North Carolina.
By the end of this webinar, participants:
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 and graduate student researcher with the lab Research to Eliminate Global Cancer Disparities. 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