Oral

This organized panel combines four papers that all address, in some fashion, women’s health disparities, and all focus on the fact that many factors are instrumental in determining healthcare outcomes. The four papers are all strong on methods, and have specific learning objectives that can be achieved by attending and participating in the session. The first two are empirical studies of access and utilization of preventive mammography among women who are fully covered for these services by Medicare. Both showcase the role of place and context in yielding factors in addition to race or ethnicity that impact outcomes, resulting in health disparities. They demonstrate that the availability of insurance coverage is not sufficient to ensure that mammography services are used. The third and fourth papers are related to maternal health. The third is a conceptual paper describing how methods used in evidence-based-practice reviews might be improved to better reflect disparities in healthcare outcomes. Its aim is to teach the participant how to identify gaps in the literature that can be addressed by systematic reviews of maternal health, and understand the key constraints and requirements in conducting more useful reviews. The fourth paper shows us that while expanded insurance coverage may improve early initiation of prenatal care, it is not sufficient to reduce racial disparities in prenatal care among pregnant teens. These findings suggest that a similar insurance expansion to cover all poor women is unlikely to eliminate disparities in prenatal care utilization.

Session Objectives: 1. Describe how characteristics of places affect disparities in health outcomes. 2. Explain why the availability of insurance coverage (alone) does not eliminate disparities. 3. Describe how reviews of evidence-based medicine should be structured to account properly for health disparities.

CE Credits: CME, Health Education (CHES), Nursing