Journal of health care for the poor and underserved
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J Health Care Poor Underserved · Jan 2016
Gender-affirming Surgeries in the Era of Insurance Coverage: Developing a Framework for Psychosocial Support and Care Navigation in the Perioperative Period.
Transgender people have a gender identity different from their birth-assigned sex. Transgender people may seek gender-affirming surgeries to align their body with their identified gender. ⋯ However the expansion of covered gender-affirming surgeries to safety-net populations has highlighted the need for an expanded presurgical process which includes a psychosocial assessment and care navigation. The proposed framework expands the preoperative assessment to include these components, and can be used to guide both health systems and insurance providers in the development of transgender medicine programs.
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J Health Care Poor Underserved · Jan 2016
Randomized Controlled TrialTikanga Māori (Māori Customary Practices) in Oral Health Research.
Early childhood caries is a global health issue for Indigenous populations. The study, "Reducing disease burden and health inequalities arising from chronic dental disease among Indigenous children: an early childhood caries intervention," is being conducted in Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa/New Zealand.
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J Health Care Poor Underserved · Jan 2016
Health Care and Human Trafficking: We are Seeing the Unseen.
This study aimed to build the evidence base around human trafficking (HT) and health in the U.S. by employing a quantitative approach to exploring the notion that health care providers encounter this population. Furthermore, this study sought to describe the health care settings most frequented by victims of human trafficking. ⋯ While health care providers are serving this patient population, they do not consistently identify them as victims of human trafficking.
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J Health Care Poor Underserved · Jan 2016
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Implementation and Impact of the Affordable Care Act in U.S. Farmworker Communities.
Farmworkers are a unique population within rural communities and are often overlooked and undercounted. They face significant disparities in health and health care access compared with the general rural population. One goal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is to increase access to health care and health insurance for the country's most vulnerable and underserved populations. ⋯ Apart from anecdotal accounts, we lack the necessary data to assess the ACA's impact on farmworker communities. This commentary imparts information about farmworker enrollment in and barriers to accessing health insurance, collected through individual conversations, focus groups, interviews, and informal surveys. Based on identified challenges and limitations, we make policy recommendations to assess and improve the implementation and relevance of the ACA in farmworker communities.
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J Health Care Poor Underserved · Jan 2016
Reducing Medical School Admissions Disparities in an Era of Legal Restrictions: Adjusting for Applicant Socioeconomic Disadvantage.
A diverse physician workforce is needed to increase access to care for underserved populations, particularly as the Affordable Care Act expands insurance coverage. Yet legal restrictions constrain the extent to which medical schools may use race/ethnicity in admissions decisions. ⋯ We found that socioeconomic and under-represented minority disparities in admissions could be eliminated while maintaining academic readiness. Adjusting applicant academic metrics using socioeconomic information on medical school applications may be a race-neutral means of increasing the socioeconomic and racial/ethnic diversity of the physician workforce.