CAPTION: Ananta, Addala believes both environmental and discrimination contribute to disparities in health care.
A presentation by Ananta Addala, to the virtual American Diabetes Association congress addressed how low socioeconomic status is a main driver of disparities in health care.
Ananta, a paediatric endocrinologist and physician scientist at Stanford University, California, referred to a variety of sociodemographic characteristics that feed into the disparities found in paediatric diabetes care.
She addressed the role that socioeconomic status has in those disparities and noted that previous research had shown that minority patients often receive a lower quality of health care than their peers.
She put some of the reasons down to environmental factors and discriminations. Clinical judgement about appropriateness of care as well as patient preference have also been considered as contributing to the difference in care quality, but have long been noted as not contributing to disparities, but Ananta believes that both do.
See also the UK National Paediatric Diabetes Audit (NPDA) published by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (London, UK) with their findings that access to vital diabetes technology varied considerably by both race and ethnicity, and social deprivation status. ‘Widening racial and social gap in diabetes’
https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-8587(21)00183-2
Advocacy Action – Can you use either, or both the above, to raise the disparities and what the evidence shows is behind them in diabetes care?