By Treadwell, Henrie M
I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.” – Newton J. Amazing Grace. In: Olney Hymns.
London, England: W. Oliver; 1779.
Community Voices: Healthcare for the Underserved, an initiative funded and initially operated by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and now run through a program office at the Morehouse School of Medicine, has health justice as its fundamental mission. This initiative has matured over the past decade from a national network of learning laboratories into a program with distinctive and directive practice and policy goals. The program needed to evolve, because far too many people in this nation are “invisible” when solutions for devising humane and accessible health care plans are proposed by public policymakers.
Who do we count among us? We embrace the “working every day” poor men and women of color and the homeless. We stand with exoffenders who are barred from obtaining safe and affordable housing, employment with health benefits, and loans to finance their educational dreams. Who else appears invisible to policymakers? Restaurant workers, domestic workers, and laid-off workers have apparently slipped off the screen, as have the day-care providers who watch over our children, the pastors of small and medium-sized churches serving poor and near-poor communities that dot our landscapes, and countless others. What these millions of people have in common is limited or no access to comprehensive primary health care. Thus, these legions are left to suffer needless pain and premature deaths and to somehow make a way out of no way, as if they were to blame for the failings of our society.
The work of Community Voices across the nation served to affirm particularly serious deficiencies in our systems of care that had already been highlighted in the Journal, namely, the connections between racism and health (section 1), critical appraisals of health care reform proposals (section 2), and the need to reconnect the mouth to the body of public health through provision of oral health care throughout the life course (section 3). Community Voices also faced the reality that other topics and populations were being neglected and desperately needed attention. Thus, we sponsored Journal issues on our broken mental health systems (section 4), men’s health (section 5), and prisons and health (section 6). When we began our work a decade ago, little had been written about the mental health service gaps that affect our communities, the plight of poor men of color, or the thorny issues of reentry and recidivism among incarcerated populations. That has now changed for the better.
This special legacy issue pulls together memorable selections from the Journal on the aforementioned Community Voices priorities and permits collective reflection on the vast chasms in access to humane and comprehensive health care that impede the attainment of health justice in our nation. The array of articles across formats also permits examination from diverse perspectives of the state of health and well-being in this nation, the land of the free, the home of the brave.
In communities across the nation, Community Voices has established permanent beachhead health services that were driven by informed community-based decisionmaking and strategic informing of policy activities (see http:// www.communityvoices.org). We believe our nation is poised on a pathway that may ultimately lead to health justice. Our hope is to ensure that others see the way, and we trust that this legacy issue will serve as a guidepost.
Henrie M. Treadwell, PhD
National Center for Primary Care
Morehouse School of Medicine
Atlanta, GA
doi;10.2105/AJPH.2008.145540
Copyright American Public Health Association Sep 2008
(c) 2008 American Journal of Public Health. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.
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