Black Lives Matter and Health Equity

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Statements released July 3, 2020

Honoring Choices Virginia’s Response to the Black Lives Matter Movement

American health care and the practice of medicine have been built on a system that inherently leads to inequity of care. Black Americans today experience major disparities in the delivery of care, which negatively impact health outcomes and quality of life. Honoring Choices Virginia (HCV) believes that Black Lives Matter and is committed to opposing and dismantling racism in all its forms.

Although HCV has always been committed to equity in healthcare, we acknowledge that we have not done enough and must do more. Moving forward, we will be more explicit about our commitment to racial justice. We commit to building an organization where Black voices are uplifted and empowered to address barriers and to design and implement solutions for advance care planning.

Honoring Choices Virginia’s Health Equity Statement

American health care and the practice of medicine have been built on a system that leads to inequity of care based on factors including race, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), age, disability, and socioeconomic status. As a consequence, many Americans today are oppressed and experience major disparities in the delivery of care which negatively impact health outcomes and quality of life.

Person-centered care (PCC) was developed as a means of reversing the paternalistic and financially motivated models of medical practice, which are prevalent within our current health care delivery system. Advance care planning (ACP) is an essential component of PCC. Discrimination, as a dehumanizing force, is incompatible with PCC. In order to embrace fully the ideology of person-centered care, all of us within the health care community must commit to opposing oppression in all its forms.

This transformation starts when we as individuals acknowledge and root out the prejudice and biases that consciously or unconsciously affect each of us every day. We must all work together to reimagine our institutions and systems so that individuals—their values, lived experiences, and beliefs—are at the center of the delivery of care.

Our purpose at Honoring Choices Virginia (HCV) is to guide individuals in identifying the truth that lies within, and to empower them to take responsibility for their own health care. For HCV and our ACP colleagues, we will have succeeded when person-centered care is no longer a catch-phrase, but a way of life. HCV acknowledges that we have not done enough and must do more. Moving forward, we will be more explicit about our commitment to justice in health care. Therefore, we commit to:

  • Build an organization, including our Board of Directors, staff, committees, partners, and volunteers, that authentically represents the diversity of the communities we work alongside
  • Center our services on individuals and communities by providing the support needed for them to design and implement their own solutions to barriers in person-centered care
  • Conduct a review of our curriculum documents and training that identifies and eliminates implicit and explicit bias and prejudice
  • Work with our partners to design just practices around data collection in communities and to be transparent in our data sharing
  • Support social justice practices of our community partners, donors, funders, and other stakeholders
  • Speak out against unjust models, systems, practices, and policies that negatively affect access to person-centered care or contribute to disparate health outcomes
  • Publicly hold ourselves accountable to the standards we set in our equity statement and next strategic plan by sharing them with all of our stakeholders and publishing them on our website

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