Structural Differential — A 32-Year-Old Man with Persistent Wrist Pain

Structural Vulnerability in the U.S. Revealed in Three Waves of COVID-19

“…11,16 Additional risk factors are the structural vulnerabilities of minority populations. 2,4,17 Many individuals in these groups lack health insurance coverage and cannot afford social distancing because they are either day laborers or service industry workers and have to use public transportation. Many cannot consider missing work because of infection risk or even actual infection, as they depend on daily wages to support them and their families, and losing one paycheck may translate into homelessness.…”

“…Many cannot consider missing work because of infection risk or even actual infection, as they depend on daily wages to support them and their families, and losing one paycheck may translate into homelessness. 7,17,18 Similarly, documented immigrants living in the United States on a path to obtain citizenship may not seek medical care, even if suffering from symptoms consistent with Covid-19, because of concerns that using Medicaid services could impair their ability to remain in the United States. 7,18,19 Unwilling to seek health care and afraid of losing their jobs, thousands of individuals working in meat-processing plants-many of whom are undocumented immigrants-have contracted COVID-19, with many deaths in Georgia, Colorado, and Pennsylvania.…”

Improving Understanding of Screening Questions for Social Risk and Social Need Among Emergency Department Patients

“…This short screening tool was developed to be of use to ED clinicians attempting to link patients to community resources, health system administrators developing programs to address adverse social determinants of health, and researchers working to improve care and outcomes for patients with social risk and social need. Given the importance and goal of integration of social determinant measures in clinical practice, 12 , 13 we encourage future work to focus on testing the tool across multiple EDs, comparison with population level data, as well as implementation-science work regarding best practices for screening patients, and connecting them to appropriate community resources to improve health outcomes.…”

Leveraging anthropological expertise to respond to the COVID‐19 global mental health syndemic

“…Anthropologists can investigate the social, political, and economic structural factors that impact mental health and health care to help clinicians and health‐care systems respond to these factors (Seymour et al. 2018 ). They can also inform policy to decrease structural iatrogenesis (Stonington and Coffa 2019 ) and its unintended consequences (Pigg 1993 ) and consider the social forces that directly impact diagnosis and treatment (Holmes et al.…”