Health Equity and Patient Safety: You Can’t Have One Without the Other

You cannot have high-quality, safe care that is inequitable. Yet certain factors such as race, sex, language, and socioeconomic class contribute to pervasive health inequities in the U.S. healthcare system. It is important to understand the systemic causes of health inequities to inform targeted strategies that promote health equity.

With limited information available about the role health inequities play in patient harm, healthcare organizations must take purposeful action to evaluate their current practices through an equity lens, and question their previously held assumptions, views, and values.

What You Can Do

Your healthcare organization can apply an equity lens to your quality and safety work to better understand the role inequity plays in health outcomes. There are tools and resources to help your organization get started.

Resources That Can Help

Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity
A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report that outlines the root causes of and community-based solutions to health inequity in the U.S., including community tools to promote health equity.

Improving Health Equity: Assessment Tool for Health Care Organizations
An IHI assessment tool for healthcare organizations to evaluate current health equity efforts, build equity strategies, and promote conversations within an organization to improve health equity.

Ingraining Equity into Quality and Safety: A System-Wide Strategy
A comprehensive 4-step strategy NYC Health + Hospitals proposes for health systems to advance equity with quality and safety.

Advancing Safety and Equity Together
A New England Journal of Medicine article about how health systems can leverage patient safety programs to advance equity.

Informing the New Administration: Advancing Racial Equity in America
A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) feature story about its research to understand the effects of systemic racism on systems and organizations to identify concrete solutions that advance equity and inclusion.

Share Your Learning to Help Make Care Safer

Healthcare organizations that contribute to Oregon’s Patient Safety Reporting Program (PSRP) have the opportunity to share information about the race and ethnicity of a patient affected by an adverse event. Over time, however, it’s become a much more frequent occurrence for reporting facilities to indicate that the patient’s race or ethnicity were “unknown,” with this occurrence averaging 44% of PSRP reports each year since 2017. Research shows that race differences in adverse events exist in the United States. In order to understand their impacts in Oregon, more complete information about race and ethnicity is needed. By sharing this information through PSRP and Early Discussion and Resolution, healthcare professionals and patients and their families help contribute to state- and nation-wide efforts to understand the role inequity plays in patient safety and promote health equity to make care safer for all patients.