Accelerating Health Equity Conference: Day 3 roundup
Noting that COVID-19 didn’t create inequities, but elevated their impact on communities, Bechara Choucair, M.D., senior vice president and chief health officer for Kaiser Permanente and former White House vaccine coordinator, closed the 2022 Accelerating Health Equity Conference with lessons learned from fighting the coronavirus as a health system and a nation.
“For us to be able to lift up and support people to be healthy, we have to support their social health, their mental health and their physical health,” Choucair said. “You can’t expect someone to live a healthy life if they don’t have a stable roof over their head.”
The closing keynote brought to an end three days of conversations about health equity, community partnerships and ways hospitals and health systems can best support their diverse communities.
Other Day 3 highlights included:
- A session on connecting care with social needs, with insights from health care leaders in two distinctly different cities, Washington, D.C., and Cleveland.
- A discussion of one person’s advocacy work in his Port Arthur, Texas, community to secure environmental justice.