Note from the Editor
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Note from the Editor
As our Silver Anniversary year draws to a close, we are proud to present a collection of work on four themes: 1: Women’s Health; 2: Sexual Minority Health; 3: International and Immigrant Health; and 4: Health Policy and Health Services. The ACU contributions that serve as frontpieces to the issue introduce the wider readership to the organization’s Health Care Heroes for 2014 (Paul Kaye, MD and Sharlann Trussell, APRN, MSN, BC, NP-C) and discuss recommended clinical practices for depression and intimate partner violence screening during prenatal and antenatal care. They set the stage well for the opening theme of Women’s Health.
The core of this issue opens with a Commentary from the Director of the Office of Women’s Health, Sabrina Matoff-Stepp, PhD and her colleagues. Dr. Matoff-Stepp, noting that women make roughly 80% of all health care decisions in U.S. households, focuses on women’s leadership roles in the context of health care decision-making and Affordable Care Act education and outreach, and implications for reaching broader health and social goals. Other papers in the Women’s Health section spring naturally from these reflections, which also arise again in the issue’s final section, on Health Policy and Health Services.
A burgeoning area of research concerns the health and health care of sexual minority populations (including people who identify as gay, lesbian, transsexual, transgender, and bisexual), and for us it has yielded the papers in the issue’s second section. There is some overlap with other matters of identity here, interestingly, in that one of the papers in this section concerns American Indian Two-Spirits, another Appalachians, another immigrant Latinos, and a fourth people living in Guatemala City.*
Dr. Ronal Patel of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative; the Department of Emergency Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Harvard Medical School opens the third section of this issue by addressing the promise of micro-finance globally, arguing that despite the concerns legitimately raised about for-profit banking in this sector, micro-finance schemes should be proliferated and developed into tools for improving health for the underserved. The other articles in this section center on South Africa, Kenya, the Dominican Republic, African immigrants to the U.S., and people in the U.S. with limited English proficiency.
The longest section in this issue is the last. Its broad scope includes a number of papers touching on the Affordable Care Act, including one (by Dr. Dana Patton) examining the effectiveness of state-level Offices of Minority Health on reducing health disparities. Section four also includes papers looking into the consequences of [End Page x] other sorts of policy decisions, including Kari White et al.’s paper on changes in the use of county public health services following implementation of Alabama’s restrictive immigration law.
I would like to close this volume out by addressing again the scope of the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. We limit ourselves to papers concerning people in North and Central America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa for at least two reasons. The first is that this geographic range corresponds (albeit inexactly) with the range of the English-speaking African Diaspora. As JHCPU is a project of Meharry Medical College—the oldest and largest historically Black medical school in the United States—this seems fitting. (On the other hand, within our geographic range, we focus on all underserved populations, not just those of African descent who are underserved.) The second big reason for our range is pragmatic: Our staff is small and our job is huge already. Many areas of the world—especially the great nations of Asia, the Middle East, and Europe—are simply too big for us to take on.
Having made these stipulations, however, I am brought up short by the relevance of this journal for audiences that concern themselves with dispossessed people around the world. Over a decade ago, Michael Bird wrote the following:
“In my mind, disparity and dispossession go hand in hand. The massive dispossession that removed native people from their ancestral lands—not to mention the...
