Trauma care disparities have been documented for decades, but our understanding of their origins has shifted dramatically, from patient-level factors and provider bias toward structural and systems-level forces such as socioeconomic barriers, geographic access gaps, prehospital undertriage, and hospital quality variation. This lecture will explore the evolving evidence on the origins of disparities, present frameworks for understanding their complexity, and discuss implications for trauma nursing practice and advocacy.
Learning Objectives
- Describe the multilevel factors, including insurance status, geographic access, hospital quality variation, and implicit bias, that contribute to disparities in trauma care outcomes and explain how their relative contributions have been clarified by recent research.
- Apply a social determinant of health framework to identify upstream and downstream drivers of inequitable trauma outcomes in clinical practice.
- Discuss the role of trauma nurses in recognizing and mitigating disparities at the point of care, including triage, pain management, discharge planning, and rehabilitation referrals.
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Speaker:
Judy Mikhail, PhD, MBA, RN
Senior Program Manager, Michigan Trauma Quality Improvement Program (MTQIP)
Department of Surgery, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Editor-in-Chief Journal of Trauma Nursing
