Fernando De Maio, a professor of sociology at DePaul, now holds a joint appointment with the American Medical Association as director of health equity research and data use. (Image courtesy of Fernando De Maio) Sociology professor Fernando De Maio has co-authored a new article on health equity and the COVID-19 pandemic, published this month in the
Journal of the American Medical Association.
“The opportunity exists to reimagine and redesign the health care delivery and education systems through a lens of health equity and racial justice," write De Maio and his co-authors, Jonathan M. Metzl of Vanderbilt University and Aletha Maybank of the American Medical Association. "The pandemic highlights the extent to which no one is safe until everyone is safe, health outcomes can be improved more broadly."
De Maio was recently appointed director of health equity research and data use at the American Medical Association's Center for Health Equity. He remains on faculty at DePaul, where he co-founded DePaul's Center for Community Health Equity with Rush University Medical Center.
“The burden of COVID-19 requires us to acknowledge not just the social determinants of health, but the even more upstream causes – the structural drivers — that generate poverty and sustain structural racism," De Maio says. “We advocate for a fundamental change in medical education and for self-reflection within the US health care system for its role in creating and sustaining structural inequities."
The full text of the article, “Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Need for a Structurally Competent Health Care System," is available at
https://bit.ly/DeMaioJAMA.