Global health systems remain far from achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG 3): "To ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages", and SDG 10: "Reduced inequalities". Progress has been made in many areas, notably in increasing life expectancy, reducing maternal and child mortality, and fighting communicable diseases. However, progress has stalled in some areas and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has devastated health systems and communities, threatening the reversal of decades of work.
Simultaneously, in 2020, the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, by a white police officer in the USA, sparked a fresh wave of international protests against police brutality and racism. The death of George Floyd and other black Americans has catalyzed the exposure and discussions around deep-rooted injustices and systemic racism. Health systems are not immune and there is strikingly clear evidence of institutional racism, other forms of discrimination, and inequities in healthcare, globally.
In 2020, Health Systems Global called upon the health services research community to consider how we can re-imagine health systems for better health and social justice. In support of this, and SDGs 3 and 10, BMC Health Services Research launched a collection to curate innovative research broadly examining the environmental, political, and social factors that perpetuate health inequities and social injustices in health systems. We welcomed submissions covering the following topics:
Research could also focus on specific marginalized population groups, such as indigenous populations or ethnic minority groups.
This collection is no longer accepting submissions and closed on 28th May 2022.
Magdalena Szaflarski, PhD, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
Magdalena Szaflarski, PhD, is a medical sociologist specializing in health and health care disparities and the social determinants of health. Dr. Szaflarski’s research has focused on immigrant health and health care, medicalization of cannabis, religion and HIV, social factors in epilepsy, and, recently, COVID-19 experiences and reactions.
Women from ethnic minority backgrounds are at greater risk of adverse maternal outcomes. Antenatal care plays a crucial role in reducing risks of poor outcomes. The aim of this study was to identify, appraise,...
Māori have been found to experience marked health inequities compared to non-Māori, including for injury. Accessing healthcare services post-injury can improve outcomes; however, longer-term experiences of hea...
Promotion, uptake, and adherence of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is paramount to ending the HIV epidemic among young Black men who have sex with men in the South. The purpose of this study was to explore st...
An important dimension of care and case managers is to support geriatric patients in obtaining social services in medical, nursing, therapeutic and social fields. To this, they advise and represent their patie...
The Correction to this article has been published in BMC Health Services Research 2023 23:91
Arabic-speaking refugees are the largest group of refugees arriving in the United States since 2008, yet little is known about their rates of healthcare access, utilization, and satisfaction after the end of t...
Sepsis affects 1.7 million patients in the US annually, is one of the leading causes of mortality, and is a major driver of US healthcare costs. African American/Black and LatinX populations experience higher ...
The relationship between healthcare service accessibility in the community and incarceration is an important, yet not widely understood, phenomenon. Community behavioral health and the criminal legal systems a...
Despite the benefits of genetic counseling and testing, uptake of cancer genetic services is generally low and Black/African American (Black) women are substantially less likely to receive genetic services tha...
The purpose of SNAP Out Stigma (SOS) was to design and implement a community-based intervention to reduce HIV-related stigma for people living with HIV (PLWH) in the Deep South. This region is a subset of 9 st...
COVID-19 catalyzed a rapid and substantial reorganization of primary care, accelerating the spread of existing strategies and fostering a proliferation of innovations. Access to primary care is an essential co...
Populations have varying needs and expectations concerning health care that result from diversity characteristics such as a migrant background, gender identity, disability, and age. These needs and expectation...
Older persons living with HIV (PLWH) need routine healthcare to manage HIV and other comorbidities. This mixed methods study investigated digital equity, constituted as access, use and quality, of HIV and spec...
One aim of publicly-funded health care systems is to provide equitable access to care irrespective of ability to pay. At the same time, differences in socioeconomic status (SES) are associated with health outc...
Research exploring telehealth expansion during the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that groups disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 also experience worse access to telehealth. However, this research has ...
Asian Americans represent one of the fastest-growing immigrant groups in the U.S. and are at high risk for cardiometabolic diseases (CMDs), including type 2 diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, and...
The number of women living in Italy and seeking cross-border reproductive care (CBRC), especially for medically assisted reproduction (MAR), has increased. The purpose of this study was to explore CBRC attitud...
This article investigates the extent and sources of late diagnosis of cancer in Tanzania, demonstrating how delayed diagnosis was patterned by inequities rooted in patients’ socio-economic background and by he...
Street sex workers (SSWs) are a highly marginalised and stigmatised group who carry an extremely high burden of unmet health need. They experience multiple and interdependent health and social problems and ext...
The aim of the study was a comparative analysis of legislative measures against discrimination in healthcare on the grounds of a) race and ethnicity, b) religion and belief, and c) gender identity and sexual o...
Diabetes mellitus has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. As the prevalence of diabetes continues to rise, the burden of disease is divided unevenly among different populations. Racial/ethnic di...
To examine racial/ethnic and educational inequities in the relationship between state-level restrictive abortion policies and adverse birth outcomes from 2005 to 2015 in the United States.
Occasions of self-discharge from health services before being seen by a health profession or against medical advice are often used by health systems as an indicator of quality care. People self-discharge becau...
Transgender, or trans, people experience a number of barriers to accessing gender-affirming healthcare and have a range of barriers and facilitators to primary care and specialist services, commonly citing dis...
Poor reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health outcomes in Nigeria can be attributed to several factors, not limited to low health service coverage, a lack of quality care, and gender inequ...
More fragmented ambulatory care (i.e., care spread across many providers without a dominant provider) has been associated with more subsequent healthcare utilization (such as more tests, procedures, emergency ...
Valid and reliable quality measures can help catalyze improvements in health care. The care of transgender patients is ripe for quality measurement, as there is increasing awareness of the increasing prevalenc...
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