RWJF Health Care Disparities Report -

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has recently issued a Health Policy Brief appearing in HealthAffairs.org. Achieving Equity in Health discusses the health care disparities experienced by ethnic and racial minorities in the United States. Some improvements in the area of quality of health care for minorities compared to whites have been made but much work on this complex issue still needs to be done. There are still disparities in minority mortality rates as well as a higher prevalence of diabetes, stroke and preventable diseases. The report describes the causes of the disparities to be education, geography and neighborhood, environment, stress, inadequate access to health care, inability to navigate the system and provider ignorance or bias. One portion of the report noted that in 2000-2004 black women experienced 8.8 more deaths per 100,000 people than white women. Please read the report for more details.

All women are at risk for ovarian cancer and other gynecologic cancers. Many organizations are reaching out to minority women to educate them about ovarian cancer.

Here is a link to a spanish Ovarian Cancer Tutorial on Medlineplus :

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/spanish/tutorials/ovariancancerspanish/htm/index.htm

Also the American Cancer Society has a booklet What is Ovarian Cancer? in Spanish

http://www.cancer.org/Espanol/cancer/ovario/Guiadetallada/cancer-de-ovario-what-is-what-is-ovarian-cancer