Partners for Health is a support system to help individuals and groups interested in addressing health disparities in rural and underserved communities.
Support for patients trying to improve their health
Partners for Health is a grass-roots, community-based organization whose sole purpose is to address health disparities in the Mississippi Delta and other rural and under-served communities. A health disparity exists when one group of people has significantly worse health outcomes than another. Health disparities can and do exist across many different social groups. For example, they may exist across racial lines, socio-economic classes, or geographic regions.
In particularly severe circumstances, health disparities may exist along all of these distinctions. This is the case in the Mississippi Delta and other under-served communities in the United States. Data is clear, for example, that African-Americans in the Mississippi Delta have poorer health outcomes than their white peers. It is also true that those living in poverty have worse outcomes than those who do not and those living in rural areas have worse outcomes than their urban and suburban counterparts.
Health disparities in the Mississippi Delta, however, not only exist between groups within the region, but they also exist for the region as a whole. That is, as a whole and by group, health outcomes in the Mississippi Delta are worse than most other regions of the United States. This means, for example, that outcomes for Mississippi African-Americans are worse than African-Americans in general and outcomes for Mississippi whites are worse than whites in general. Overall, health outcomes in the state of Mississippi rank last of all fifty states.
While the health disparities in the Mississippi Delta are among the worst in the nation, many other communities across the country suffer from similar problems. We believe the Partners for Health model can be successful in any community of need. Although many of these communities of need are rural, they are not exclusively so. Many minority urban populations display similar health disparities.
There are many known causes of health disparities, including access to care, socioeconomic conditions, education level, cultural influences, and personal health habits. Any number of efforts have attempted to address these conditions, and Partners for Health does not profess to be a single solution to this complex problem with many social and cultural factors. Multiple efforts on many levels will continue to be necessary to address the need. We do believe, however, that the Partners for Health model brings a new and useful approach to addressing the problem.
