Journal of health care for the poor and underserved
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J Health Care Poor Underserved · Jan 2016
Language Access and Health Equity: Changes under the Affordable Care Act.
Health disparities between English-proficient and limited English-proficient (LEP) groups in the United States have been widely documented. Provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), including increased funding to community health centers and resources to help consumers who are purchasing Marketplace coverage afford new access to health care for speakers of languages other than English, which includes more than 60 million individuals, one-third of whom are LEP. This commentary discusses the legislative precedent for, successes of, and potential future directions for the implementation of the ACA as it relates to language access, health disparities, health equity, access to health care, and the linguistic needs of the LEP population in the United States.
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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
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.