Reducing racial and ethnic disparities in health care: an integral part of quality improvement scholarship
- 1Department of Medicine, Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
- 2Department of Pediatrics, Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
- Correspondence to: Dr M H Chin University of Chicago, 5841 South Maryland Avenue, MC 2007, Chicago, IL 60637, USA; mchin{at}medicine.bsd.uchicago.edu
It is vital that quality improvement interventions address this unacceptable problem
We advocate three fundamental additions to the draft guidelines for quality improvement (QI) manuscripts proposed by Davidoff and Batalden.1 The purpose of these additions is to highlight the opportunity that the guidelines offer for reducing racial and ethnic disparities in health care.
Equity is one of the six quality aims defined by the US Institute of Medicine in their 2001 report “Crossing the Quality Chasm”, along with safety, effectiveness, patient centeredness, timeliness, and efficiency.2 So far, effectiveness has been a frequent target of QI programs. Clearly, effectiveness is an important goal, but addressing equity offers great opportunities for profound improvement for both individual patients and society as a whole.
Racial inequity in health care is common to many pluralistic societies and is increasingly regarded as unacceptable. The Institute of Medicine’s 2003 report “Unequal Treatment” documented substantial racial and ethnic differences in the quality of care in the USA.3 The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and Commission for Racial Equality recently released “Race Equality Guide 2004” which provides a framework for achieving racial equality in the care of patients at NHS facilities.4 Racial gaps in care are important because they lead to needless morbidity, medical complications, and mortality. …
