Comparisons Made At Nursing Homes
Black nursing home residents in Maryland and Virginia are more likely than white residents to be sent to hospitals for dehydration, poor nutrition, bedsores and other ailments because of a gap in the quality of in-house medical care, according to a study to be published in a medical journal.
Researchers affiliated with Brown University's medical school found that 23 percent of black nursing home residents in Maryland were hospitalized in 2000, compared with 17 percent of white residents. That year in Virginia, the researchers found, 20 percent of black nursing home residents were hospitalized, compared with 18 percent of white residents.
Researchers said the findings in the two states reflected a national trend. Nationally, researchers said, the hospitalization rates were 24 percent in 2000 for black nursing home residents and 19 percent for white residents.
The study is scheduled to be published in the June issue of the journal Health Services Research; findings were released online in November. The study concluded that economic factors were significant in the quality of nursing home medical care. In homes that relied heavily on Medicaid, had lower employee-to-patient ratios or operated without a nurse practitioner or a medical director, residents were more likely to be hospitalized, said Susan C. Miller, associate professor of community health at Brown's Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research in Providence, R.I.
Within the past month, there has been story after story about racial disparities in health care and it is NOT all related to ability to pay. Given America’s history as recorded in
Medical Apartheid, its almost to point where declaring that we are witnessing a sanitized form genocide is no longer a :tinfoilhat: conclusion.
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