Medically Underserved Area

Reducing disparities in cancer care requires an understanding of “the science of trustworthiness” and a greater focus on social determinants of health, according to a leader in health equity research.

The American College of Cardiology, the Heart Rhythm Society and the Bristol Myers Squibb/Pfizer alliance announced they have launched a program to improve management of atrial fibrillation in underserved communities.

In this video, Jim Mazzo, vice president of the Ophthalmology Foundation, discusses the purpose of the newly formed charitable enterprise to educate ophthalmologists in underserved areas around the world.

Edith P. Mitchell, MD, FACP, FCPP, FRCP, has been recognized as a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London.

American Association for Cancer Research today released its first Cancer Disparities Progress Report, which aims to raise awareness of the substantial effect of cancer on racial and ethnic minorities and other underserved populations.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham’s department of family and community medicine has received a $7 million grant to help increase the number of PCPs in rural and urban underserved communities in the state.

For many years in eye care, gender differences were overlooked. Both at a program level and the national level, this issue was not actively addressed. In my experience as manager of the Seeing is Believing (SiB) program at the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, I was surprised that project managers had to be challenged to consider gender. Once SiB projects managed to collect and report with gender disaggregated data, project reports still arrived with the statement: “Cataract surgery outputs of men and women are 50:50; therefore, we are doing fine.” Unfortunately, this was not and is not the case. There are many reasons why not. One is demographics: Women tend to live longer than men. According to the World Population Ageing (WPA) 2019 report of the United Nations, at the global level, in 2015 to 2020, women’s life expectancy at birth exceeds that of men by 4.8 years. Longer life expectancy results in a higher proportion of older women as compared with men, and this disparity increases in older age groups. The sex ratio at older ages can be stark. In Europe, at older than 80 years, the ratio is 53 men to 100 women; in Asia, 71 men to 100 women, according to WPA 2017 data. Also, gender intersects with other causes of inequality and inequity. Therefore, if eye care is being delivered in a ratio 50:50 at many locations, we are not “doing fine.”