What are the long-term effects of unequal healthcare access on your health?

Preventable Conditions Worsen: Lack of access to preventive care like checkups, screenings, and vaccinations can lead to earlier onset and worse complications from preventable diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers. Chronic Conditions Neglected: Without regular medical care and treatment, chronic conditions like asthma, high blood pressure, or mental health issues can worsen significantly. This can lead to increased hospitalizations, disability, and even premature death. Delayed Diagnoses: Limited access to diagnostics can delay or prevent accurate diagnoses. This can postpone necessary treatment and worsen long-term health outcomes.

These disparities stem from social determinants of health, like poverty, education level, and access to nutritious food, which disproportionately affect certain communities. This creates a cycle where lack of resources leads to poorer health, which then makes it harder to obtain the resources needed to improve health.

Talking about mental health in schools, religious centers, public gatherings etc should be normalized. Continuously raising awareness of the impacts of poor mental health and providing individuals with accurate self-care practices to support informed decisions can promote overall well-being.

In my experience, we face two different challenges: (1) people who doesn't have access to proper prevention health equipments and (2) people who doesn't know how to use properly the healthcare system. For the first one, in my country when you have distance regions from the downtonw, the health access is poor, mainly for exames and diagnosis, which I believe the government should be able to adress in equity the distribution of everything. For the second one, we should educate our people since kids on how to use public services and make the properly prevention routine of check-ups and exames.

I'd like to briefly explain #Inequity vs #inequality vs #disparity & then everyone should be able to better understand the health outcome of these entities. Health inequity : avoidable differences in health status of different social groups. They are not the product of biological or inevitable disparities but of human-made systems that privilege certain groups and underserve others. Even though most severely impacts marginalized groups, but finally affect everyone Inequality : simply refers to the uneven distribution of resources. For example, health differences based on age, are health inequality. A disparity : simply means a difference. It does not specifically refer to differences that are result of unfairness or injustice