Message From the Immediate Past President of SOPHE: Inaugural SOPHE Summit on Eliminating Health Disparity

Abstract

It has been 20 years since the 1985 Secretary’s Task Force Report on Black and Minority Health was released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (1985). That report concluded that there was an excess of 60,000 deaths among Blacks and other minorities that could have been avoided had the playing fields been even. Subsequent publications have indicated that the number of excess deaths among African Americans has increased to 80,000 (Heisler, Rust, Pattillo, & Dubois, 2005). The disparities in diseases and death tell a story of persistent inequity in society. The focus on excess death has resulted in a focus on clinical intervention to prevent death. Although such a focus is warranted, a critical area of inequity that has yet to receive the same level of attention as clinical intervention is the social environment that creates conditions that promote vulnerability to diseases that account for excess deaths. This negligence in not focusing on the social environmental factors contributing to persistent health disparities among racial and ethnic minorities in the United States was the impetus for the SOPHE Inaugural Summit on Health Disparities in August 2005. Eleven years ago in 1995, SOPHE published its first Research Agenda in Health Education (Clark & McLeroy, 1995). The goal of that document was to help the health education profession frame its research priority for the future. The 2005 SOPHE summit marked 20 years after the Secretary’s Task Force Report on Black and Minority Health and 10 years after the publication of SOPHE’s first research agenda. These two research documents derived from two historical moments of health education and public health inquiry and converged to guide the profession to reframe an agenda for future research in health education in order to optimize the impact that the field has on reducing health disparities. In 2005, SOPHE invited some 85 researchers and practitioners to its Inaugural Summit to Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. The SOPHE summit represented a historical trajectory for affirming and recommitting ourselves to a research agenda for the profession. Although the summit focused our attention on those disparities relating to racial and ethnic minorities, this agenda actually