Process Evaluation

Program evaluation for contending against racial inequities in the healthcare sector

Program evaluation for contending against racial inequities in the healthcare sector

Introduction

Health disparities in the US are linked with social factors such as ethnic background. They are evident in the screening of patients, treatment plans that are suggested, survivorship, and even mortality rates. Studies have shown that culture-based discrimination can limit an individual’s access to high-quality healthcare services and even health insurance (Carten, Siskind & Greene, 2016). This creates cumulative intergenerational difficulties in accessing healthcare, resulting in poor health in successive generations of Minority populations. Social workers are best placed to track disparities to address them. They can also create strategies that will prevent gaps in healthcare provision from growing larger. This program evaluation to analyze racial inequities in the healthcare sector will be led by a social worker.

Stakeholders

In this program evaluation, the stakeholders are entrusted with generating ideas for its design and support. The stakeholders include community members, Medicaid & Medicare Services, the Governor’s office, and Patient and Advocacy communities. For care programs to succeed, it is necessary for ordinary citizens to collaborate with State agencies. The proposed program evaluation’s workers will keep community and health leaders appraised of all developments.

Stakeholders’ role in the agency and concerns that they may have about evaluation of the proposed program

Stakeholders have different responsibilities in leading this program evaluation. First, they have to analyze approaches that are often used by healthcare workers when they operate in diverse cultures. According to Browne et al. (2017), social workers can improve community health outcomes because they are trained to work in partnership with various organizations with different evaluation tools and then assess the effectiveness of their interventions. They are also trained on how to translate research results for diverse communities. Stakeholders are also tasked with gathering and interpreting health data from different communities. In addition, stakeholders are also tasked with analyzing the relevance, strengths, impact, and weaknesses of existing healthcare delivery systems before recommending culturally-based interventions to improve healthcare service delivery in different communities.

Moreover, there are stakeholder concerns that a social worker who is experienced in consensus-building can address when addressing healthcare concerns. For instance, the social worker will provide examples of how to use culturally-based approaches to obtain data concerning healthcare service delivery disparities in different communities. She will also teach the stakeholders how to use inter-professional strategies to generate collaborative healthcare service delivery practices in diverse communities. It is necessary to employ cultural humility to realize this objective.

Purpose of the Program Evaluation

According to Jones & Phillips (2016), social workers are trained to harness community practice efforts to find ways to improve healthcare service provision for marginalized populations. This evaluation aims to use this training to find the causes of disparities in healthcare service provision within a given state. To achieve this objective, the stakeholders will first seek to:

· Define the factors causing this problem: It has already been established that there are high levels of premature death due to preventable diseases in Minority communities within the state in question. This means that Minority communities have to contend with a greater burden of mortality than the mainstream population. This program evaluation will identify systemic problems that hinder the ability to address such issues within Minority communities.

· Analyze all available data to better understand this health disparity problem being experienced in Minority communities. This data may, for instance, reveal that the problem is a gap in policy decision-making due to the lack of adequate information about healthcare access within a specific Minority population.

· Identify all factors that cause long-term problems regarding the provision of healthcare services for Minority populations. There may be environmentally-related, individual or system-related factors contributing to health inequities. Environmental factors such as biochemical risks and poor housing conditions can cause high morbidity levels in any community. Individual-level causes may include a lack of knowledge about maintaining a healthy body, or poor attitudes towards health preservation strategies (Grant & Toh, 2017). System-level factors that can cause health inequities include poor infrastructure or the absence of community health agencies that can address issues such as how to handle preventable diseases.

Questions that will be addressed and the type of information that will be collected

The questions that will be addressed include:

· What problem is being addressed?

· What are the significant factors that keep contributing to the problem?

· What information has been collected to address the causal factors?

· What strategies and interventions are most suitable for dealing with the problems identified?

· Is there any evidence from previous studies which indicates that the recommended practices will work when applied in this case?

· How will the interventions that have been proposed be tracked?

Data Collection

In this project, data will be collected through needs assessment, as the project aims to identify healthcare service provision problems within specific populations. This means that the targeted population cannot be defined by a particular race or geographical area (Thornton et al., 2016).

Conclusion

Disparities in providing healthcare services for Minority populations are rooted in different problems such as racism and economic inequalities. It is important to address these problems to ensure a country’s general health prosperity. Social workers can help to improve the provision of healthcare services by cultivating supportive experiences between different stakeholders at low cost. This program evaluation will assess existing health networks within a specific state with the aim of addressing existing health inequities. This evaluation aims to enable stakeholders to create culturally-grounded interventions which will benefit different Minority communities.

References

Browne, T., Keefe, R. H., Ruth, B. J., Cox, H., Maramaldi, P., Rishel, C., & Marshall, J. (2017). Advancing social work education for health impact. American Journal of Public Health, S3, S229-S235.

Carten, A. J., Siskind, A., & Greene, M. P. (2016). Strategies for Deconstructing Racism in the Health and Human Services. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Grant, D. M. & Toh, J. S. (2017). Medical social work positions: BSW or MSW? Social Work in Health Care, 56(4), 215-226.

Jones, B. & Phillips, F. (2016). Social work and interprofessional education in health care: A call for continued leadership. Journal of Social Work Education, 52(1), 18-29.

Thornton, R. L., Glover, C. M., Cene, C. W., Glik, D. C., Henderson, J. A. & Williams, D. R. (2016). Evaluating Strategies For Reducing Health Disparities By Addressing The Social Determinants Of Health. Health Aff., 35(8), 1416-1423.

Williams, D. R., & Cooper, L. A. (2019). Reducing racial inequalities in health: Using what we already know to take action. Int J Environ Res Public Health. , 16(4), 606.