This episode features a conversation between Megan Sandel, MD, MPH, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health and co-lead principal investigator with Children’s Health Watch, and Rhea Boyd, MD, MPH, a pediatrician, public health advocate, and scholar who is the Director of Equity and Justice for The California Children’s Trust and most recently, co-developed THE CONVERSATION: Between Us, About Us, a national campaign to bring information about the COVID vaccines directly to Black communities. This session is the second in a series focused on health care sector efforts to provide Assistance to patients to reduce their social risks. Megan and Rhea explore the ways in which social inequality has been encoded and medicalized in the conceptualization of social care and challenge us to think differently about what “health equity” means. 

Recommended references:

• Boyd RW, Lindo EG, Weeks LD, McLemore MR. On Racism: A New Standard for Publishing on Racial Health Inequities. Health Affairs Blog. 2020.
• Benjamin R. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity. 2019.
• Eubanks V. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. Picador USA. 2019.
• Krieger N, Boyd RW, De Maio F, Maybank A. Medicine’s Privileged Gatekeepers: Producing Harmful Ignorance About Racism and Health. Health Affairs Blog. 2021.
• Putnam-Hornstein E, Ahn E, Prindle J et al. Cumulative Rates of Child Protection Involvement and Terminations of Parental Rights in a California Birth Cohort, 1999–2017. AJPH. 2021.
• Hooks b. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Routledge (3rd ed). 1984, 2014.
• Barceló N, Shadavran S. Race, Metaphor, and Myth in Academic Medicine. Acad Psychiatry. 2020.