Former U.S. surgeon general addresses inequalities in health care for minorities

Dr. David Satcher, former U.S. surgeon general, (left) and Danille Taylor-Guthrie, chair of IU Northwest’s Department of Minority Studies, gather for a reception before the beginning of the seminar, “Your Health is Community Health.” Satcher stressed the importance of quality health care for ethnic groups and minorities.

“It’s a big job, but it’s doable,” Satcher said.

He described huge differences in the way poor and minority peoples suffer from conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, infant mortality rates and AIDS. There have been significant improvements in reducing the disease rates, but the numbers are still staggering. For example, of all the newly reported cases of AIDS in America last year, 70 percent were African-American or Hispanic.

The barriers to getting good health care seem as large as the problems, Satcher said. Minority and poor people have a harder time getting access to quality health care, suffer from polluted environments and are more likely to suffer from violence.

However, Satcher said he has seen dozens of pilot programs trying to eliminate the disparities.

“It’s good to see the excellent things that have happened, but we have to make sure all groups benefit,” he said.

Another key is exposing students and health-care professionals to such problems, said Danille Taylor-Guthrie, chair of IU Northwest’s Department of Minority Studies.

“What we try to do is expose people to these kinds of things,” Taylor-Guthrie said. “I’m hoping people will take up the initiative to go into their communities and make the changes.”

Sponsored by the Diversity Programming Group and the Department of Minority Studies, in cooperation with the Black History Month Committee, the event was free and open to the public. A reception preceding the event allowed many health-care students, leaders in the community and IU Northwest faculty to talk with Satcher.

Satcher is currently the director for the new National Center for Primary Care at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Ga. Serving as surgeon general and assistant secretary for health simultaneously from February 1998 to January 2001, Satcher led the national effort to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health, an initiative that was incorporated as one of the two major goals of Healthy People 2010, the nation’s health agenda.