In a city with more than 8.4 million people, access to quality healthcare becomes an issue. One of the issues that patients face is health disparities between various races, ethnicities, gender and even body weight. Health disparities are gaps in the quality of health and health care that mirror differences in socioeconomic status, racial and ethnic background, and education level. These disparities may stem from many factors, including accessibility of health care, increased risk of disease from occupational exposure, and increased risk of disease from underlying genetic, ethnic, or familial factors. These differences are due to social inequalities and results in more avoidable illnesses and deaths in one group of people than another. There
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This discrepancy was due to their access to the recourses and information about the hospital, quality of care received by primary care physicians and other factors. The authors analyzed records from hospitals in the five boroughs and Westchester. They studied 17 different specialties, which included surgical and non-surgical areas. They noticed that in terms of travel time, residents in Westchester County had better access to high volume hospitals in upper Manhattan than residents who lived in Brooklyn or Staten Island. This is surprising because you would assume that since Brooklyn is closer to Manhattan those residents would have better access to its hospitals. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians were less likely to use a high volume hospital for 13 or more of the 17 specialties that they studied. There was a 20% difference between Blacks and Whites for care in cancer and cardiovascular procedures. The only exception to this was with the treatment of AIDS. There was a reverse for this area because New York City set up clinics in lower-income neighbors specifically for HIV/AIDS treatment and diagnosis. They found that after the difference in race/ethnicity was taken into account, the other causes for the lack of high volume hospital usage was due to proximity to a hospital, age, socioeconomic standing of the patients neighborhood and at some level, the type of insurance that the patient has. Those other factors were important but wasn’t as significant as the difference in
This discrepancy was due to their access to the recourses and information about the hospital, quality of care received by primary care physicians and other factors. The authors analyzed records from hospitals in the five boroughs and Westchester. They studied 17 different specialties, which included surgical and non-surgical areas. They noticed that in terms of travel time, residents in Westchester County had better access to high volume hospitals in upper Manhattan than residents who lived in Brooklyn or Staten Island. This is surprising because you would assume that since Brooklyn is closer to Manhattan those residents would have better access to its hospitals. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians were less likely to use a high volume hospital for 13 or more of the 17 specialties that they studied. There was a 20% difference between Blacks and Whites for care in cancer and cardiovascular procedures. The only exception to this was with the treatment of AIDS. There was a reverse for this area because New York City set up clinics in lower-income neighbors specifically for HIV/AIDS treatment and diagnosis. They found that after the difference in race/ethnicity was taken into account, the other causes for the lack of high volume hospital usage was due to proximity to a hospital, age, socioeconomic standing of the patients neighborhood and at some level, the type of insurance that the patient has. Those other factors were important but wasn’t as significant as the difference in