Monica Peek: addressing diabetes health disparities

Abstract

Monica Peek's diverse research portfolio has included diabetes, breast cancer, and COVID-19. The common thread running through her work is the impact of structural and interpersonal racism on people's lives and health. “Fighting racism…this is part of my core, essential to who I am”, says Peek, Professor of Medicine in the Section of General Internal Medicine at the University of Chicago, IL, USA. Her research has been instrumental in improving shared decision making between clinicians and low-income Black patients with diabetes. “Shared decision making is something that has historically been studied in Europe, Canada, and the USA among primarily white patient populations. Yet the largest power differentials between patients and their providers do not occur in race concordant relationships. It occurs between physicians, who are disproportionately affluent and white, and patients who have less power because of marginalised social identities such as race, national origin, or sexual orientation. That is where we need shared decision-making efforts the most”, she explains. Peek and her colleagues have created shared decision-making models, tools, videos, and standards that are now used by diabetes organisations. By any means necessary: why lowering insulin prices is relevant to racial health equityWhen young revolutionaries in the 1960s sought to free Black people in the USA from lives of structured racism (ie, the differential access to opportunity, goods, and services by race) “by any means necessary”,1 few people imagined this movement might one day include efforts to overcome exorbitant insulin prices. Yet organisations such as the Black Panther Party (BPP) understood long ago how poverty and other structural inequities lead to worse health, and were instrumental in creating a framework for cross-sector collaboration to address health disparities in low-income Black communities. Full-Text PDF