Spartans join governor’s task force to address racial disparities in healthcare

<p>The task force is acting in an advisory capacity to the governor and studies the causes of racial disparities in the impact of COVID-19 and recommends actions to immediately address such disparities and the historical and systemic inequities that underlie them. <br> <br> There are two Spartans on the task force. Debra Furr-Holden is an epidemiologist and the associate dean for Public Health Integration at Michigan State University and the director of the Flint Center for Health Equity Solutions. Randy Rasch is professor and dean of the MSU College of Nursing. <br> <br> “When we were looking at the coronavirus and the pandemic in Michigan, we recognized that African-Americans, who are 14 percent of our population, were overrepresented in terms of infection with the COVID-19 disease and deaths from it at about 40 percent,” says Rasch.<br> <br> “The thing that I appreciate the most about the task force is, one, the work was already afoot,” adds Furr-Holden. “There was already work underway to deal with racial, ethnic, and other vulnerable and marginalized population disparities. We have a lot of groups and a lot of segments of our population in Michigan that are at excess risk for not getting basic primary care and preventive services.<br> <br> “What we've seen during COVID-19 is an amplification effect. So COVID-19 was not the beginning of health disparities for Michigan or the nation. It unveiled some very important underlying both social and political determinants to health and has given us an opportunity to identity targets for intervention so we can have people experience health and access to healthcare as a right and not a privilege that's based on economics or race or ethnicity or any other type of status.”<br> <br> “One of the things that the primary care work group is also looking at is who are those trusted members in the community who can work with an understanding of how people are actually living and think creatively how to do social distancing, how to do the hand-washing, and do all those t