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Pennsylvania Department of Health Office of Health Equity Health and Welfare Building, Room 628, Harrisburg, PA 17120-0701 (717) 783-4790 (Phone) (717) 787-4366 (Fax) https://www.dhs.pa.gov/
The Pennsylvania Department of Health Office of Health Equity (OHE) was established to address health disparities, significant differences in health status, the delivery of health services, and the utilization of health services. The OHE is dedicated to providing a centralized location to coordinate activities and collect information in order to effectively serve disparate populations. The Office works with policy makers, insurers, health care providers and communities to implement policies and programs that result in a measurable and sustained improvement in the health status of underserved and disparate populations.
PA Dept. of Health Regional & Statewide Health Equity Capacity Building & Health Disparity Strategic Plan Implementation Project $140,000 Jamahal Boyd Sr. (717) 787-4366 jamboyd@state.pa.us
This State Partnership project seeks to implement and support capacity building efforts with appropriate stakeholders to reduce and eventually eliminate health disparities in Pennsylvania. The focus areas of the project include improving health care access, workforce diversity, and cultural and linguistic appropriate services for minority populations, especially African Americans, Hispanics and Asians. Many of the health disparities in Pennsylvania can be attributed to an under-representation of racial and linguistic minorities among the health professionals in Pennsylvania, which leads to disparities in health care utilization. Also, disparities in access to quality care in both rural and urban areas are due to a lack of providers and an inability of individuals to get to them. To address this issue, the project will hold six regional health equity summits and one statewide summit to assist in the implementation of the Office of Health Equity's statewide and regional strategic plan to address health disparities in Pennsylvania. The project will convene stakeholders to review and finalize an implementation plan with recommendations for future action to eliminate health disparities. In addition, the project will develop educational tools, improve the health status of the population, improve access to health care services for all populations, and programmatically demonstrate a reduction in health disparities. An evaluation will be conducted to assess if there is an increase in the participation in local health improvement partnerships, and an improvement in the cultural competency of health care providers. The project staff will collect data on a range of performance measures, including the number of stakeholders attending each summit, the number of sub-committees formed to implement plans and objectives from the strategic plan, and the number of community programs developed and designed to eliminate health disparities. The evaluation is structured so that each objective of the final plan will have a baseline measurement and progress toward the goals will be tracked. Participant attendance will be tracked and evaluated to determine the breadth of outreach and variety of contributing organizations. For each regional summit and the statewide summit, the Office of Health Equity will conduct an After Action Review with the leaders, staff and partners to gain maximum benefit from every program activity or task.
OMH objective(s) toward which the project's results most contribute:
Key Healthy People 2010 objectives or subobjectives toward which your project's results most contribute (see Appendix 3 of OMH's Evaluation Planning Guidelines): Healthy People objectives were not specifically identified.
