Join the Oklahoma Health Equity Campaign!
*If a contact in your community is not listed, please call 405/271-9444, ext. 56410.
Oklahoma is taking action!
Oklahoma Health Equity Campaign:
State health organizations and community leaders have joined forces to shine the light on the glaring socio-economic and racial inequities in health and to search for ways to fight their effects on Oklahomans. The campaign alerts state and community leaders on socio-economic and ethnic inequities in health and will engages leaders in conversation and action to fight the effects of these inequities on Oklahomans. We can no longer assume that all citizens in Oklahoma will have equal opportunities for prevention interventions that lead toward behaviors conducive to health. Our individual aspirations for better health not only to medical and lifestyle intervention but to "upstream" policies — investing in our schools, improving housing, integrating neighborhoods, creating living wage jobs with career ladders, even more equitable fiscal policies. When health equity through resource opportunities is achieved, then all citizens will be positioned to adopt healthy behaviors, leading toward improved health status for Oklahoma.
Join us!
Call the OSDH Health Equity and Resource Opportunities Division at (405) 271-9444, ext. 56535 for more information.
For more information about the national campaign, please visit: www.unnaturalcauses.org.
 ABOUT THE SERIES: The four-part series reveals a slow killer in plain view: the social circumstances in which we are born, live andwork that can affect our risk for disease as surely as germs and viruses.The U.S. already spends twice per person on health care than any other industrialized nation. Yet our life expectancy ranks 30th — Costa Ricans live longer. Infant mortality? We’re tied with Hungary, Poland and Slovakia for next to last among industrialized nations. Illnesses cost American business more than a trillion dollars a year in lost productivity.
Further, research has revealed a gradient to health. At each step down the socio-economic ladder — from the rich to the middle class to the poor — people tend to be sicker and die sooner. It’s no surprise that poor Americans die eight years before the rich on average, but middle-class Americans die almost three years sooner than the rich.
The program looks at what’s making us sick in the first place, investigating startling new findings that suggest there is much more to poor health than bad habits, inadequate health care or unlucky genes. The series circles in on a slow killer in plain view: the social circumstances in which we are born, live and work that can affect our risk for disease as surely as germs and viruses.
Oklahoma joins national partners, the Health Policy Institute of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the National Association of County and City Health Officials,
the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors, the American Public Health Association in developing initiatives and plans to utilize "Unnatural Causes" and accompanying tools to introduce equity and social justice into discussion of health and conversely, inject health consequences into debates over social and economic policies.
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