Using the lens of advocacy, social justice, and your findings in the module assignments, you will reflect on vulnerable populations, the potential health disparities they face, and your role as a healthcare administrator.
Introduction
It is a validated fact that the societal structure governed by inequity gives rise to the condition labelled as “preparing to be ill”. The argument is anchored on the observation that some people face a total blockade to healthcare even when they desperately need it due to inadequacies in their finances or their insurance coverage is insufficient. Others click through the various options in the healthcare matrix until they finally get the services that they are seeking. Health disparities and inequalities affect similar vulnerable populations across the board: the homeless, LGBTQ, the impoverished, single parents, and racial and ethnic minority populations. This report details how healthcare managers can create optimal environments for the marginalized and vulnerable populations, overcome health disparity challenges, and shape their perspectives via analytical thinking, analytical writing, and action planning.
Positioning as a Healthcare Executive
It is important to understand that the healthcare system is a chaotic environment that caters to diverse cultures. Therefore, healthcare administrators need outsmart the political, economic, cultural, and scientific issues that characterize the contemporary healthcare milieu to be successful. All these factors invariably impact access to healthcare services and eventual outcomes. Positioning as an executive of healthcare systems or an administrator that functions as head of a functional unit within a health services institution means ethical responsibility to their community (Butler, 2022). Research indicates that social determinants (SDOH) contribute mainly to health disparities and inequalities affecting racial and ethnic homes (Nigg et al., 2020). Healthcare executives/administrators must use analytical thinking and action planning tools to help address the identified SDOH to achieve healthcare equity by diminishing health disparities.
Need original Research Paper?
The Role of Analytical Thinking
Healthcare administrators/ executives should position themselves in the organizational framework as progressive change-makers via analytical thinking, including regulation, order, controls, operational management, horizontal collaboration, accountability, rewards, sanctions, and feedback mechanisms (Martins, 2021). As an administrator, I would support the PHPs by employing evidence-informed strategies obtained via analytical thinking to tackle healthcare cost inequities while simultaneously augmenting the quality as well as comprehensiveness of their services. PHPs obtain 80% but are at the bottom tier of the hierarchy by summer wage due to lack of sustainable working and financial power (Zombies, 2023; Centers for Economic and Policy Research, 2019). In this vein, property taxes must be maintained, as 24% of state and local taxes are diminished by providing permanent, fair wages. Workers and their families will earn at least $197,050 more per year by obtaining stable housing than working full-time in affordable housing without the ability to save or live well. In addition, stable housing remains pivotal to achieving other sustainable determinants of health and diminishes the possibility of insecure work, financial hardship, stable health, and incarceration (Zombies, 2023).
Using Action Planning and Analytical Writing
Action planning entails writing down our community's vision to ensure long-term impacts, sustainability, and accountability. Healthcare managers should understand why we need such a progressive change when writing action plans. Healthcare needs to make enormous systemic changes in how it manages social values and orient workforce development and new Medicaid payment models concerning the Significant Role of Improving Health Equity, Not Just Health Care. These changes must occur quickly, and they must include everyone – patients and their families, paid home care, shelter providers, and affordable housing advocates must all join hands to make this radical transformation happen. Simultaneously, administrators should leverage analytical writing to authoritatively convey data and facts on SDOH and their immense potential to steer opposite directions to derive health equity sustainability (Butler, 2022). For example, it was established that prolonged healthcare system interactions reduce the population's racial justice outcomes, including worsening mass incarceration and redistributive politics (Ranganathan, 2023).
Diversity and health disparities are two sides of the same coin, as conscious diversity would make it easy to achieve health equity because steps can be taken in the right direction (Martins, 2021). As a result, my perspective on health disparities has shifted to view diversity as an avenue to ach