Grace Advertising & Consulting, Inc.

- 9 - accessHealthNews.net December 2023 Volume 10 | Issue No. 79 The Kansas City Health Equity Learning and Action Network (the LAN), under the leadership of the Health Forward Foundation and in partnership with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), and the KC Health Collaborative (KCHC), actively develops comprehensive strategies and action plans to dismantle medically racist systems that circumvent optimal health and perpetuate health inequities for people of color. Health Forward's purpose is to support and build inclusive, powerful, and healthy communities characterized by racial equity and economically just systems. IHI has spent more than two decades leveraging improvement science to advance and sustain health outcomes in health and health care globally. KCHC is a multi-stakeholder, nonprofit, community organization that works to catalyze meaningful health and health care delivery improvements to position Kansas City as a national leader in health, well- being, and economic vitality. Collectively, these organizations established the LAN which convenes the region's health ecosystem including federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), community based health clinics, health systems, physicians, payers, employers, public health departments, and community based organizations. With more than 50 organizations participating, the LAN provides a forum for engagement, girded by a shared agenda, with education, training, tools, and expertise to markedly change systems, policies, and structures. The goal is to eliminate disparities in health care delivery, while realizing measurable improvements steeped in equity- centered, culturally responsive health outcomes for all health care consumers. The group's mission aligns with a long list of health care sojourners who saw the bough break more than a century ago and who dared to buck structures designed to perpetuate health disparities, inequities, and injustices for Black and Brown people. Now the LAN is on the frontline battling medically racist structures that have managed to persist since the early framing of Kansas City's health care system. In the early 1900s, health care access was systematically denied to people of color, and when it was offered at the old City Hospital in Kansas City, Black and Brown patients received substandard care or outright neglect. For people of color, sheer access to health care services was the critical need. Living conditions for many Black and Brown people were colored by a lack of culturally responsive and compassionate care, housing access structured by red lines, and post-slavery wages designed to keep families downtrodden and impoverished. Add to that the weathering effects of racism on one's physical and mental health, and naturally health outcomes for Black and Brown people flagrantly lagged behind their White counterparts. But as fate would have it, there was always a ram in the bush. READ MORE In the early 1900s, health care access was systematically denied to people of color, and when it was offered at the old City Hospital in Kansas City, Black and Brown patients received substandard care or outright neglect.

• Cover