What Is the Role for Anesthesiologists and Anesthesia Practices in Ensuring Access, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion?

Why does it matter? The concept of health equity involves promoting the elimination of health disparities, which are strongly associated with social disadvantage, and ensuring all members of society experience a fair opportunity to be as healthy as possible.1,2 Health disparities have traditionally been examined across socioeconomic status and comorbidities, but the social determinants of health are much more complex. They include differences in health opportunities such as safe housing, quality education, and structural racism.2 Therefore, health disparities are more inclusively and accurately defined as systematic differences in health that are potentially avoidable and which occur between groups of people whose social hierarchies, according to power and wealth, have influenced access to health resources and overall health quality.1 However, health equity is not only a social justice issue but an economic issue. Research has demonstrated that more than $1 trillion in indirect costs associated with illness and...