At the start of the new millennium in the year 2000, the United Nations set certain goals, the Sustainable Development Goals, which were to be achieved by the year 2030. Most of these sustainable development goals tend to address the common challenges that we face as people inhabiting the universe, problems which include environmental degradation, inequality, peace, justice, poverty, health care and climate among others (Assembly, 2015). Among the development goals is the need to achieve good health for every citizen of the universe and the need to do away with poverty completely. There are specific populations that are regarded as vulnerable to diseases and dangers majorly due to their socioeconomic status (Waisel, 2013).
Vulnerable populations experience high rates of mortality, increased risk to diseases and injury, low level of access to quality healthcare as well as morbidity ( Jeffries et al., 2019 ). According to a number researches, the people living in poverty in the United States are more likely to be sick and experience conditions of disabilities. Further to that, they are also less exposed to a variety of healthcare services. Apart from the poor people, vulnerable populations are also constituted by the minority races and ethnic groups, children, the people with no homes, the aged, people with no insurance coverage, people living with HIV and AIDS and the mentally ill. Additionally, people living in rural areas are also considered part of the vulnerable population.
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Most experts tend to divide vulnerable populations in healthcare into categories, including psychological, physical, and social. These categories are based on the different healthcare needs that different vulnerable people have. There are those who have physical needs and the HIV/ AIDS patients, the physically disabled, infants, and pregnant women. There are those with psychological needs, and they include patients with mental illness such as depression as well as the ones with substance abuse addiction. The vulnerable persons with social needs include victims of racial abuse, victims of depression, relationship abuse, refugees, as well as immigrants.
Factors Responsible for Disparity in Healthcare
There are so many reasons that bring about the vulnerability of populations. They include socioeconomic reasons, the digital divide, inequalities in education among so many reasons. Vulnerability is the root cause of disparity in healthcare. It is important to understand the factors for good health as a way to easily understand the causes of healthcare disparities and vulnerable populations. Availability of certain life resources tends to determine the level of exposure that individual experience in health. The common causes of disease and conditions of illness are social factors.
According to studies about human exposure to diseases, people living in poverty have been proved to have high chances of having poor health conditions. The relationship between income levels and health is such that people with high incomes tend to be exposed to better quality healthcare than poor people ( Jeffries et al., 2019 ). Medical emergencies are, indeed, inevitable. Nevertheless, low-income earners tend to struggle to respond to instances of emergencies to the extent that they may miss getting care at an appropriate time during such instances. Their inability to react quickly to medical emergencies may be triggered by a lack of funds to move with appropriate speed to healthcare centers. The high-income earners, on the other hand, have access to the best health insurance covers, cars for quick movement to medical centers, and funds to facilitate everything.
Education is yet another factor that is responsible for the existing disparity in health care. Different people have different levels of education, and that poses certain effects to their vulnerability to health risks (Jeffries et al., 2019). Studies reveal that adults with low education such as high school level, have higher chances of succumbing to diseases than others with relatively higher level education, such as an undergraduate degree. In other researches, people with few years of education tend to live shorter than their counterparts with more years in education. Education enlightens individuals about the best ways to live free from diseases and health-related dangers hence the reason for vulnerability among less educated individuals.
Existence of disadvantaged communities is also a factor that contributes to higher levels of disparities in healthcare and increases vulnerability to health hazards. The people regarded as disadvantaged communities include those living in rural areas. People living in such disadvantaged areas have poor infrastructural networks such as poor roads and communication networks, which denies them access to better healthcare services. Moreover, such regions do not have better facilities as urban areas. In addition to all that, disadvantaged communities also have poor schools, and thus, people living in such neighborhoods tend to have access to low-quality education than the others in urban areas. All these factors pose the disadvantaged communities to higher health hazards and make them more vulnerable to health issues than the rest. Studies have also proved that children born in such disadvantaged communities are at higher risk of dying than those born in urban areas (Chokshi, 2018).
Responsibilities of Healthcare Professionals in Reducing the gap
Randall & Armstrong, (2016) opine that there is a great need for medical practitioners to concentrate their focus on meeting the needs of a vulnerable population. According to them, the number of people regarded as vulnerable increases by the day, yet the government, as well as the medical practitioners, tend to underestimate the figures as well as the needs of the vulnerable population. Specifically, persons with no health insurance coverage under the age of 65 were reported to be in the region of six million five years ago, and that figure sadly grows every year. It is important for medics to note that chronic diseases are more common among the poor and people living among disadvantaged communities. It is the responsibility of healthcare professionals among other agencies to work towards reducing the vulnerability of individuals to health hazards and diseases. Health professionals can specifically execute this responsibility in several ways (Randall & Armstrong, 2016)
Health care providers should be aware that assisting vulnerable patients takes more than the normal care that they issue. The case for vulnerable communities is special, and therefore, they should be handed special attention. The first and most important step is to identify the needs of patients before attending to them. Identifying the needs of a patient involves getting to know more about the patient besides the diagnosis ( Mossialos, Wenzl, Osborn & Sarnak, 2016 ). It is obvious that one cannot help a patient when he does not know a thing about them. Medical professionals such as nurses and physicians should develop a good relationship between themselves and their patients as a way of helping them and providing them the best care. Talking with patients makes a doctor or a nurse get to know about any mental illness that a patient may be subject to besides their diagnosis. Maybe the patient is under some depression and only talking with them and making them open up for talk can help solve such a situation ( Mossialos, Wenzl, Osborn & Sarnak, 2016 ).
Additionally, medical professionals, such as laboratory specialists can conduct multiple types of research to find possible solutions to help vulnerable persons. They should conduct studies to find out the critical factors behind particular disease prevalence among a specific group of people. Such kind of researches will give out certain findings and not mere speculated issues. The government and non-governmental organizations working on health care provisions can then borrow from such findings to find appropriate solutions to the needs of the vulnerable communities (Jeffries et al., 2019).
Healthcare professionals in their daily activities make several connections with people from various organizations majorly who focus on health care. People from the disadvantaged communities, on the other hand, are likely to be less informed of certain government-funded projects or some funded by non-governmental organizations which may help them. It is, therefore, the responsibility of a doctor or a nurse after identifying the needs of his/ her patient to connect the patient to an appropriate solution of the problem. For example, a victim of gender violence may not know what exactly to do to find help or the best way to walk out of an abusive relationship. Once the doctor identifies such a need, they can advise such a victim appropriately by leading them to a way that will guide them and help them walk out of such situations. The same example applies to an individual under depression. Apart from that, a medical practitioner can also offer direct assistance to a vulnerable patient by offering them financial assistance to aid their quest for quality care (Assembly, 2015).
A physician can also schedule his/ her appointments in such a way that it favors people with more critical conditions. This implies that he offers priority attention to the people who make first-time visits and those whose cases are more serious. On the same note, physicians can make themselves ready to always attend to emergency cases. This is because patients under emergency care are regarded to be more vulnerable to health hazards than any other patient. They are keeping all other appointments pending to attend to emergency one very ethical move towards ensuring that the vulnerable persons are accorded care.
References
Assembly, G. (2015). Sustainable development goals. SDGs ), Transforming our world: the , 2030 .
Chokshi, D. A. (2018). Income, poverty, and Health Inequality . Journal of American Medical Association , 319 (13), 1312-1313.
Jeffries, N., Zaslavsky, A. M., Diez Roux, A. V., Creswell, J. W., Palmer, R. C., Gregorich, S. E., ... & Zhang, X. (2019). Methodological Approaches to Understanding Causes of Health Disparities. American journal of public health , 109 (S1), S28-S33.
Mossialos, E., Wenzl, M., Osborn, R., & Sarnak, D. (2016). 2015 international profiles of health care systems . Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health.
Randall, T. C., & Armstrong, K. (2016). Health care disparities in hereditary ovarian cancer: are we reaching the underserved population?. Current treatment options in oncology , 17 (8), 39.
Waisel, D. B. (2013). Vulnerable populations in healthcare. Current Opinion in Anesthesiology , 26 (2), 186-192.
