A few years ago, the Department of Health and Human Services opened a program called Healthy People 2020, which hard fur main objectives that include attaining high quality and free human lives from preventable diseases, injury, disability, and the occurrence of premature health. The second objective was to remove health disparities, achieve health equity, and improve health among all groups. The third objective was to create physical and social environments that promote health among everyone, and the last object was intended to promote the quality of life, healthy development, and healthy behaviors across all stages of life. Healthy People 2020 (HP2020) has many organized objectives divided into smaller topics, each of which stands for a fundamental area of public health. Healthy people, 2020 has a user-centered website that provides reliable data, tools for action, and information. The website has a date that is regularly updated for its objectives, such as data details, resources, and methods. This foundation has a health measures section that monitors the improvements in people’s health. Those measures have been the main object for the healthy people for they reflect the impacts of the interventions which are implemented to achieve the objectives and goals of the program. The healthy people program works closely with The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which is another program responsible for collecting data on the people’s health objectives and determine if it is accomplishing its roles. NCHS also performs research to improve the performance of other health-related programs and help them fulfill their objectives. NCHS also has methods of measuring progress on the set goals and objectives of Healthy People 2020 and its related programs. Through HP2020, in conjunction with other medical-related bodies like NCHS, the health sector has greatly improved, and many medical problems have been solved. Ways of preventing preventable diseases have been effective, thus reduced the mortality rate.
Disparities in healthcare and of health are encountered in every step of maintaining chronic diseases from primary prevention to management of the disease. To spot and understand the medical disparities, data analyzing disparities must be provided to analyze disparities in incidence and prevalence, functional health outcomes, morbidity and mortality, prevention and management of diseases at all levels, the risk factors, and delivery for healthcare. This system is meant to be functional at all levels of the nation, even at the local level. Health disparities can be influenced by some factors, which include age and gender. Age has been known to be a cause of some disease in both men or female. It has been that as people age, they become more vulnerable to most diseases like heart failure, hypertension, stroke, peripheral arterial disease, among others. In gender or sex, some diseases have been linked to occur more in women than among men. Some examples of diseases common among women include depression, rheumatoid arthritis, and osteoporosis, while diseases and injuries linked to the liver are more common among men. Race and ethnicity have also brought about health disparities. The diseases affecting people have been known to be influenced by the health behaviors of the surroundings, differences in the factors of genetics, and the general environment. The minorities are said to have higher chances of getting chronic diseases. The privileged have had high death rates of diabetes, heart conditions, and cancer. Geography, Residence, and Environment are known to affect people’s health greatly. Unhealthy living, poor working environment, and inadequate access to medical health services dictated by the environment expose the residents to health effects and diseases. A good example is people living in slums have common cases of deficiency diseases due to poor diet and health issues related to poor sanitation like dirty water and food. Socioeconomic factors also bring about health disparities. Socioeconomic factors like income, education, stress, employment, among others, have shown that minorities mostly suffer from diabetes, and the less educated and with low income Usually get involved in high smoking rates. However, medical firms are trying everything possible to bridge the health disparities and solve health issues that are caused by disparities. Through this, the world of health will be a better, peaceful, and healthier place with more medical answers to health problems.
Health disparities have been proved to be a major problem facing the medical world. However, there have been ways formed to reduce and eliminate health disparities. One of the ways used to reduce disparities in public communication. This method was considered the best because it has become so easier in this century, and very few have not yet come up to it. Channels in which medically beneficial information can be passed have highly increased over the years; thus, health information has been spread widely. However, health information has been experiencing two major challenges. Among the problems faced by health, commutation is needed to translate scientific biomedical information into a simple, understandable language that can be sensible for the locals. With the complex one, only medically educated people like medical practitioners would understand the information instead of the locals who are intended to receive the information. The second problem is distributing the information to all people that need it despite their social class, geographic setting, background, or social class. However, this has probed o be a hard task due to information inequality, which is characterizing the community, and as telecommunication services increase, there is a price that pops up and requires recurring expenditure through investments to get the services. The public information on improving health has some main objectives which include providing the latest information about healthcare to improve health among places faced with health disparities, facilitate research which offers more information and solutions to health problems among students on health schools to solve more medical problems, maintain and improve communication among minorities who experience health disparities and to develop programs which successfully impact the targeted groups with medical information and services to end health disparities. With good communication among all social groups, health disparities, even when not completely finished, will be reduced by a great percentage.
Health communication needs a good plan in order for it to be effective and reach the intended lot of people. Strategies have been drawn to ensure that health study through communication is efficient. These strategies include the use of research strategies and determine the best way to deliver the results to the audience it was intended for. The medical practitioners also ensure that there is an understanding of wisdom, language, and the prioritize for people of different settings and cultures. These people also ensure cultural competence, exposure to media, the internet, health literacy access, among others, for efficiency. There has been the development of educative materials like video and picture billboards, broadcasts through television channels, newspaper articles, public places announcements, among other mass educative forms. When following the strategies, the practitioners ensure that the communication strategies change people’s perception, knowledge, and attitudes like influencing the norms of social life, empowering people to improve their health conditions, reinforces behaviors that affect them positively, and increase the support and availability of the services needed. The medical practitioners pass their strategies through some components like radio, newspapers, flyers, and other components of communication. When designing communication strategies, it is very important to understand the population it is meant to be conveyed to in order to reach a broader audience.
However, in order for communication in health education to be effective, there has to be an evaluation plan for communication strategies to be implicated. Companies and sponsors which put out information to try to end health disparities have a common aim of reaching as many people as possible. In order to achieve this, sponsors have decided to partner with each other and bring ideas together in order to achieve their objectives easier and faster. Such partnerships are encouraged so as to bring about new, strong, and more efficient expertise. With the partnerships, the latest scientific discoveries are always on their notice, and translating scientific research and implementing results to close bridges on health disparities becomes easier. To improve and catalyze the process, the partners look into the existing research networks and identify methods on how to improve them. Training for their employers is also made compulsory in order to get their way, even among the minorities who have different cultures and language barriers. Studies into past mistakes and failures are essential in developing and studying programs in the removal of health disparities. Before sending out the information, it is first edited to determine if it is suitable and friendly to the intended audience and if it will solve the pending situation or threat the audience is facing. For example, if the message is for the general public, it should be something they can relate to in their daily lives, like improving one’s life through the exercise of monitoring their diet. It can also be among the minorities who are in the slums, which should mostly be taught on the importance of boiling drinking water and proper cleaning of fruits and vegetables before consumption.
In closing up the health disparities, there are factors to consider, like the best communication campaigns to use on different audiences. Campaigns in health communication are the different components that help communication strategies to be effective. Health practitioners involved in closing the health disparities create one campaign that can be effective to many audiences focusing on the common issues among the audience. Audiences are assumed to be different, but a keen look into their lives has proved that audiences from different social class, race, and other differences have many common characteristics with respect to what factor can influence their behavior, what media platform they can access, and how a message will sound to them so that a single campaign of lower cost can be used and be effective. They also create campaigns with regard to the behaviors of their targeted audience and the essential message but direct it to a different audience by using different channels and twisting the specific details of messages. An example is identifying a campaign like the anti-tobacco campaign and use words that only tobacco users are familiar with or people of the age group like the youth use mostly among themselves. The health communication developers also create large campaigns focusing on different subgroups, their behaviors, the strategy of displaying the message, the channel of communication they use, and how the message is executed. This means that campaigns of a certain subject should make sure that it is close to their unique characteristics, which can affect them. In the process of creating effective campaigns for different groups, it should adapt the available resources, focus on the group’s behavior, and focus on the influence the contents of the campaigns will have on their behaviors and how they will respond to different messages which have been executed.
Working on this project has brought me to the knowledge that there are indeed health disparities among subgroups. It is a fact that not everyone receives the healthcare information they should in order to improve their health. The effect of income, education, race, ethnicity, income, environment, among others, can lead to precise preventive, diagnostic, and interventions. There has been a lack of enough methods to compare disparities based on race, ethnicity, and language barrier at the state, federal, and even local levels. This lack of standardization makes it difficult to identify disparities and make efforts to improve and end them. The best way to solve this is through developing systems that are more efficient and effective in linking up conventional surveillance data to a more sensible piece of data. However, in the fight against health disparities and lack of enough and good communication on health issues, nurses are the ones most depended on to solve most of the problems, for they are in contact more with all different social groups and races. This is why there are programs developed to train them on how to end cultural competence through which disparities can also be ended. Whenever in contact with patients, nurses have advised teaching their patients a thing or two concerning the things expected from them to end health disparities. Medical institutions are also finding ways to send information out to different people on the causes, effects, and ways of ending health disparities and also sending out information to educate them more on their health. If all pharmaceutical houses and institutions work together with the government, health disparities will be brought to a dead end.