Past Events
Separating Fact from Fiction: Developmental and Ethical Considerations in Pediatric Gender Health
Even though an increasing amount of data shows the benefits of gender affirming healthcare for transgender and gender diverse youth and their families, in 2023 close to half of all transgender and gender diverse youth in the US lost their access to this essential care due to bans introduced in state legislature. Disinformation about pediatric and adolescent gender affirming continues to grow making conversations about care decisions increasingly difficult. While our social and cultural understandings of gender as a spectrum becomes more accepted, medical and public spaces for transgender folks have become more restrictive. The wide difference in opinion and variable access to accurate information can make it difficult to find a framework on how to ethically think about decisions relating to gender affirming care for youth.
Inequality & the Environment: Moving from Science to Action that Advances Environmental Justice and Health Equity
People of color are more likely to breathe dirty air, drink contaminated water, and live near hazardous waste sites, industrial agriculture operations, and other sources of pollution. The accelerating impacts of climate change are having additional disproportionate effects on minoritized populations. This talk will discuss structural determinants of environmental health disparities and community-engaged research to develop decision-support tools that advance environmental justice.
Health, Equity and Climate Change
According to the World Health Organization, climate change is the single biggest threat facing humanity. Tackling the health threats of climate change, including by mitigation and adaptation, will be critical in the coming decades. Climate change gives rise to profound questions of equity or fairness. Those nations who have contributed most to climate change are not the ones most affected by it. Those nations and peoples most affected by it are often those with the fewest resources to tackle it. Responding to the health impacts of climate change therefore involves complex questions of global and intergenerational equity and fairness.
Trust Takes Two: Barriers to Trust in the Healthcare System Among Ethnically Diverse Parents
More than 20% of children in the United States live with a chronic and serious illness. Parents who care for these children are challenged by children’s intense medical needs, navigating a complex health system, and significant time demands. For parents from ethnically diverse communities, such as Somali, Hmong, and Latin American, these challenges may be compounded by numerous social and structural determinants of health including language barriers, economic insecurity, and structural racism. Recent work by the presenters and research colleagues found that common contributors to miscommunication and mistrust were lack of access to quality professional interpreters and experiences of racism in the healthcare setting.
Seen Yet Invisible: Lessons from Muslim Experiences at the Margins of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Healthcare
Drawing from the experiences of Muslim patients and providers, this lecture will extend diversity, equity and inclusion conversations to the overlooked dimension of religious identity. Through leveraging research data from 15+ years of community-engaged research the talk will describe the ways in which Muslims are disadvantaged in health equity interventions and the impacts of such upon health and professional outcomes.
Physicians’ Experiences with and Perceptions of Caring for Patients with Disability
After participating in the session, attendees were be to: Describe potential cases of health care disparities for people with disabilities; Identify major responsibilities of physicians under the Americans with Disabilities Act; and Describe barriers people with different disabilities often confront while receiving health care.
Addressing Racial Inequities in Health Outcomes During COVID and Beyond
Structural inequalities between Black and White Americans have always had devastating impacts, and these disparate health outcomes have become even more apparent in the COVID-19 era. Panelists discuss the impact of structural racism on overall health outcomes of Black Americans, the framing of police brutality against Black Americans as a public health crisis, how the record of systemic racial injustice in the United States relates to the country's human rights law obligations, racial and economic disparities that exist outside of the U.S., and strategies for addressing gaps on a national and international level to guarantee the right to health in a post-COVID world.
Advancing Health Equity During a Pandemic
Examining the social determinants of health—the environments in which people live, work, and age—is crucial to understanding the disparities COVID-19 has laid bare. People are losing their jobs and health insurance, and delaying needed health care. During this session of the University of Minnesota’s Mini Medical School: COVID-19: The Way Forward, a group of University experts focused on how we must address these realities in the months and years ahead of us. By viewing this webinar, you’ll learn about the intersection of COVID-19, economic downturn, racial disparities, and what you can do, and we can do collectively, to promote health, eliminate inequities, and envision a new kind of health care as a community.
Ethics Grand Rounds: Ethical Implications of Disparities Observed in COVID-19 for Scarce Resource Allocation
COVID-19 continues to shine a light on the deep disparities present throughout the United States, in terms of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. This talk shows mortality data, as well as occupational case data, from Minnesota and examines what this means for the ethical allocation of scarce resources, including vaccines.
Community Engaged Research for Innovation and for Equity? Implications of Taking Community Voice Seriously
Community Engaged Research (CER) contributes to health innovations by bringing the perspectives of end-users - those most impacted by health inequities – into the research process. However, CER does not necessarily lead to improved health equity or trust in the research process. In this talk, Dr. Michelle Allen describes tension points between research and community perspectives when we take community voice seriously regarding our routine ways of conceptualizing, conducting, and disseminating research. She uses examples from her own work and that of community partners to consider how we can move from CER for innovation to CER for equity.
The Ethics of Underfunding: Changing the Narrative about Native American Health Care
There is a general misconception that Native Americans receive free health care. This talk dispels that notion and gives a short history and current status of the Indian Health Care system. Dr. Mary Owen discusses the results of chronic underfunding of the Indian Health Service with a focus on the state and national impacts of COVID-19 on Native American populations.