The purpose of this assignment is to provide analytical evidence that a chosen health disparity exists, then present strategies for eliminating or reducing it. Your paper should provide an overview of the specific health disparity (health status and/or health care disparity), an explanation as to why the disparity appears to exist or not, and suggest strategies at the individual, community, and organizational levels that could be undertaken to reduce or eliminate the health disparity. The proposed strategies should target the most significant factors contributing to the target health disparity.
The paper should be a minimum of 5 pages and no more than 7 pages excluding the title and reference pages. Use APA scholarly writing guidelines in the paper including Times New Roman, 12 point font and double spacing.
Document the health disparity (based on published evidence). You will need to perform a search of information using reliable published articles (see databases such as PubMed, Google Scholar, another available library database) and the web sites of reputable organizations (e.g., NIH, CDC, WHO, PAHO, WHO, American Cancer Society, March of Dimes, American Lung Association, etc.) in order to locate the most up‐to‐date statistics available (2016 or later) on the prevalence/incidence of the health disparity and other information on its severity or impact. The statistics that you present on the specific health disparity should be compared with that reported for the general U.S. population, a specific reference group (e.g., “white” persons), or both.
Overview of the causes of the target health disparity (based on published evidence). Outline possible environmental, structural, social, cultural or behavioral causes that might have been historically responsible for the health disparity and those that are responsible for maintaining it in current times.
Identify specific causes that you think should be targeted for intervention (based on published evidence). Based on your research, identify the major factor(s) that you believe are at the root of the health disparity in question and that you suggest should be targeted to reduce or eliminate the disparity in health status and/or health care.
Discuss major issues that need to be taken into consideration when developing specific health disparity interventions. Discuss some the major issues which need to be considered (e.g., improving health literacy, cultural competency, improved health care access, health education, etc.) in order to be able to develop effective strategies to reduce or eliminate the disparity in health status for the selected ethnic group. Need to think about which ones would give the “biggest bang for the buck” and which would be most sustainable.
Describe the strategy(s) that you propose to reduce or eliminate the specific health disparity. Based on the evidence, describe in detail strategies at the policy, community, organizational, and/or individual levels that should receive greater funding priority. You must explain the reason(s) why you selected these particular strategies and if there is any evidence for their effectiveness for this or similar target groups. This should be as evidence‐based as possible.
Discuss potential threats to strategy implementation. Finally discuss the challenges that you anticipate would occur in implementing the proposed strategy(s) to reduce or eliminate the target health disparity.
References (you should use a minimum of 6 references and these should be from peer‐reviewed journals; no more than 20% can be from reputable websites such as the CDC, WHO, PAHO, AMA or similar sources). Citations from Wikipedia and low‐quality web sources are not allowed.