Overview

Perhaps more than any other American city, Chicago has been a center for the study of both urban history and economic inequity. Community Health Equity assembles a century of research to show the range of effects that Chicago’s structural socioeconomic inequalities have had on patients and medical facilities alike. The work collected here makes clear that when a city is sharply divided by power, wealth, and race, the citizens who most need high-quality health care and social services have the greatest difficulty accessing them. Achieving good health is not simply a matter of making the right choices as an individual, the research demonstrates: it’s the product of large-scale political and economic forces. Understanding these forces, and what we can do to correct them, should be critical not only to doctors but to sociologists and students of the urban environment—and no city offers more inspiring examples for action to overcome social injustice in health than Chicago.

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9780226614595

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Reviews

"""In healthcare, we are taught that the right treatment comes from the right diagnosis. Paradoxically our profession almost always gets the diagnosis for health inequity wrong, and mistreats accordingly. Health workers who read this book will interrupt that cycle, recognizing that they cannot continue to support the current social arrangement if we dream of achieving health equity this generation.""--Michelle Morse, founding codirector of EqualHealth ""Community Health Equity is an exciting and important opportunity to present the whole story of Chicago's long and deeply rooted history of structural inequities. The book exposes a city divided by power and racism, which impacts access to health care, causing gaps in public health outcomes throughout the last hundred years. The editors detail how these inequities are duly caused and reinforced by structural and social determinants of health; they also provide ways to take action to address them. The target audience for Community Health Equity is wide and broad--after all, learning from the past can help shape and influence the future.""--Christina R. Welter, University of Illinois at Chicago"

In healthcare, we are taught that the right treatment comes from the right diagnosis. Paradoxically our profession almost always gets the diagnosis for health inequity wrong, and mistreats accordingly. Health workers who read this book will interrupt that cycle, recognizing that they cannot continue to support the current social arrangement if we dream of achieving health equity this generation. --Michelle Morse, founding codirector of EqualHealth Community Health Equity is an exciting and important opportunity to present the whole story of Chicago's long and deeply rooted history of structural inequities. The book exposes a city divided by power and racism, which impacts access to health care, causing gaps in public health outcomes throughout the last hundred years. The editors detail how these inequities are duly caused and reinforced by structural and social determinants of health; they also provide ways to take action to address them. The target audience for Community Health Equity is wide and broad--after all, learning from the past can help shape and influence the future. --Christina R. Welter, University of Illinois at Chicago

Author Information

Fernando De Maio is associate professor of sociology at DePaul University and codirector of the Center for Community Health Equity. Raj C. Shah, MD, is associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine and the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center at Rush University Medical Center and also serves as codirector of the Center for Community Health Equity. John Mazzeo is associate professor of anthropology and director of the Master of Public Health program at DePaul University. David A. Ansell, MD, is professor of internal medicine at Rush University Medical Center, as well as the author of The Death Gap, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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