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Resources: Maryland Center for Health Equity

Are you looking for a lively conversation space about race, health, and history?  Join Dr. Stephen B. Thomas from the University of Maryland Center for Health Equity on The Cutting Edge Podcast as we discuss COVID-19, health disparities and saving lives in the African American community and beyond. 

 

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The Minority Health and Health Equity Archive is an electronic archive for digital resource materials in the fields of minority health and health disparities research and policy. It is offered as a no-charge resource to the public, academic scholars and health science researchers interested in the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities.

The goal of the Archive is to advance the use of new digital technologies to promote trans-disciplinary scholarship on race, ethnicity and disparities research designed to achieve health equity. The Archive will help facilitate the rapid dissemination of new work in the professional literature as well as the gray literature including, but not limited to, historical documents, government resources, teaching tools and commentary. Authors who wish to post papers to the Archive should first consult the Archive Policy.

The archive offers a category called "Browse By Subject" intended as a convenience to those searching for information regarding specific topical areas. Additionally, this method offers a convenient way for you to review our content "at a glance", as you evaluate your own documents for contribution as relevant to the current structure of the archive.

http://health-equity.lib.umd.edu/

From National Negro Health Week to National Minority Health Month: 100 Years of Public Health Evolution

The year 2015 marks the 100th Anniversary of the establishment of National Negro Health Week by Dr. Booker T. Washington.  Washington recognized the need to bring modern public health to impoverished black communities and successfully launched the Health Improvement Week in April 1915.  This movement combined health and sanitation efforts with sermons, education, and rallies and a call to health officials to improve the health of minorities.

National Negro Health Week was observed annually until 1951.  It ended not because its momentum faded, but because in a move towards integration, the US Public Health Service closed of the Office of Negro Health. Throughout its successful 35-year history, National Negro Health Week retained its commitment to community-based, comprehensive health promotion.  The movement flourished under a community mobilization approach that is mirrored in contemporary community-based engagement efforts.  It remains one of the longest-running public health campaigns in US history.

Washington’s advocacy for minority health paved the way for the establishment of federal offices, centers, and institutes dedicated to the improvement of minority health.

2015 is also the 30th Anniversary since the landmark 1985 Report of the Secretary’s task Force on Black and Minority Health, or the “Heckler Report”, an eight-volume report documenting, for the first time, the existence of health disparities between racial and ethnic minorities and whites. 

Over the past 100 and 30 years, African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities have seen great improvements in their health and quality of life.  Yet the persistence of significant disparities in health highlights the progress that has yet to be made.  In this 100th year since the launch of National Negro Health Week we commemorate Washington’s efforts to improve minority health and recommit to eliminating health disparities and achieving health equity.

In celebration of 100th Anniversary of the establishment of National Negro Health Week and the 30th Anniversary of the release of the Heckler Report, Tuskegee University, Morehouse School of Medicine, and CDC will sponsor a health summit - "National Negro Health Week to National Minority Health Month: 100 Years of Moving Public Health Forward” on April 17, 2015.

For more information on National Negro Health Week:

Read the article by Sandra Quinn and Stephen Thomas in Minority Health TodayThe National Negro Health Week, 1915 to 1951: A Descriptive Account.

Read the article by Sandra Quinn in Minority Health TodayThe National Negro Health Movement: Lessons for Eliminating Health Disparities Today.

Visit Tuskegee University, National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care.

Center for Health Equity faculty, staff, and affiliated personnel: If you have been invited to participate in an M-CHE file-sharing project on Basecamp, please sign in.

Reimagining Government is a podcast where we shine a light on government changemakers around the world, who are pushing beyond the current debate about what government does, in order to address the more fundamental questions of how government should operate.

 

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