HAN member Stanford Health Care hosted a Health Equity Symposium that highlighted the importance of partnerships in addressing disparities. When Martin Luther King Jr. alluded to disparities in income, housing and education during a speech at Stanford University in 1967, he was referring to what physicians today would recognize as social determinants of health, said Joyce Sackey, MD, chief equity, diversity and inclusion officer at Stanford Medicine.
Omar Lateef, president and CEO of HAN member Rush University System for Health, discussed the importance of the anchor mission in improving the health of the community at large. “That means if you hire locally and you give jobs and you give financial stability to your community, you’ll save lives. … We have to use businesses anyway. Why not fund our own neighborhoods?” Dr. Lateef also shared that the West Side United anchor network, which Rush is a member of, has become “a national model for how a community could get together and solve inequity.”