The Healing ARC:
Inspiring Race-Conscious Collaborations that Eliminate Racism in Patient Care
WHAT IS THE Healing ARC?
The Healing ARC — acknowledgment, redress, and closure — is a pragmatic framework for addressing documented institutional racial inequities in health care delivery and treatment of patients. With fresh evidence from the disparities in COVID-19 infections and deaths, racism is widely recognized as detrimental to the health of people of color – more than 240 cities and counties across the U.S. have declared that racism is a public health crisis. Racial inequities in health, many of which are institutionally derived, have proven resistant to attempts at their rectification. The Healing ARC framework addresses disparities in patient care by enlisting communities and health care institutions as equal partners, equally motivated to identify and eliminate health and health care inequities with race-conscious strategies. These applications are absolutely necessary for families and individuals confronting the effects of structural racism that is killing them, their family members, and their friends. Healing ARC interventions accomplish two antiracism goals simultaneously: clinician education through acknowledgment of the racial inequity and redress for Black, Hispanic, and other patients of color.
Overview
The Healing ARC Campaign
A prominent group of healthcare professionals formed The Healing ARC to shape interventions that eliminate structural racism in hospitals, healthcare systems and care facilities that contribute to racial and ethnic inequities in patient care. The primary mission for our campaign is to raise awareness of The Healing ARC framework and other race-conscious work that can transform patient care for people of color. Our campaign begins in Massachusetts. We want hospitals and care facilities in Massachusetts to treat ALL patients with dignity, respect, and fairness. Massachusetts residents, like those nationwide, are entitled to patient-centered and people-centered healthcare, which requires addressing the institutional racism that prevents some, particularly those in communities of color, from receiving equal care.
The Healing Arc:
The Healing ARC: Panel of Experts Explain Why Race-Conscious Approaches are Needed to Eliminate Racism in Patient Care
Used with permission from Institute for Healthcare Improvement (ihi.org). Remarks by Kedar Mate, MD, President and CEO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), at the IHI Leadership Alliance Spring 2022 meeting for the session titled, “An Antiracist Agenda for Medicine”.
How Healing ARC and
Race-Conscious Approaches Are Transforming Healthcare Across America
Dr. Camara Jones
Get more information about implementing The Healing ARC
Studies & Articles
American Heart Association
Identification of Racial Inequities in Access to Specialized Inpatient Heart Failure Care at an Academic Medical Center
HF patients who receive cardiology care during a hospital admission have better outcomes. This study examined the relationship between race and admission service, and its effect on 30-day readmission and mortality.
American Heart Association News
Boston Review
An Antiracist Agenda for Medicine
Colorblind solutions have failed to achieve racial equity in health care. We need both federal reparations and real institutional accountability.
Our effort to understand and correct racial health disparities has led us to rethink the nature of the fight for racial justice in medicine.
Bram Wispelwey & Michelle Morse
Cureus
Racialized Differences in Perceived Patient Self-Advocacy as a Driver of Admission Inequities
Racial inequities in mortality and readmission for heart failure (HF) are well documented. Inequitable access to specialized cardiology care during admissions may contribute to inequity, and the drivers of this inequity are poorly understood.
Cureus – Peer Reviewed
Healing ARC
Call To Action
POLICYMAKERS
ELECTED OFFICIALS
Stop approving racist policies. Have the courage to acknowledge that race-conscious policies are required to eliminate inequities in healthcare that lead to unhealthy and harmful outcomes for people of color. Provide the resources for these policies to be implemented at scale where they can help transform our society.
COMMUNITIES
HEALTH WORKERS/CLINICIANS
HOSPITAL AND HEALTH SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS
PHYSICIANS
Healing ARC
Newsroom
Featured items from the Healing ARC Newsroom
The Healing ARC cultivates a collaborative space grounded in intentionality and earned trust from the impacted community. This framework establishes a space of equal partnership between historically harmed populations and culpable institutions through transparency, authenticity, and the empowerment of voices from vulnerable populations. With a focus on building trust within communities and sharing decision making power, the Healing ARC framework serves as a model for leveraging community need, input, and trust to redress systemic and institutional harm.
The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare, once again, stark racial inequities in suffering and death in the United States. Simply talking about health equity is insufficient—we need action. The Healing ARC (acknowledgment, redress, and closure) framework inspires interventions that will help health facilities provide equitable access to care for all patients.
Healing ARC will provide an inspirational example of how healthcare leaders can identify and b egin to dismantle structural and institutional forms of racism that are often invisible to many actors in these systems. This is urgently needed at a time when healthcare providers are acknowledging that inequities exist, yet fail to see them in their own practices. Healing ARC reinforces the fact that racism can’t be tackled until it is clearly exposed and intentionally addressed.
The Healing Arc framework is critical as it gives us in health and medicine a path, language, skills, tools, towards true healing. It gives us a paved path to undo the harm and trauma we have normalized. It gives the future of medicine a new foundation and home to do better and be better in. So when our communities come to our “home” in their most time of need, when our communities come to us for help and healing, we truly are healing, not harming. And they leave our home with a sense of safety, genuine care – all ingredients essential to true, good, health.
In the face of deeply entrenched structural racial inequities, individuals and organizations can easily become paralyzed. The Healing ARC is proving to be a powerful antidote to that phenomenon by providing a rigorous, evidence-and-action based model for healthcare settings. I am both heartened and honored to play a role!
The application of the Healing ARC work at Brigham and Women’s Hospital should be lauded- it represents a commitment to implementing healthcare that is equitable. At a time when many well-intentioned leaders and health systems may not know how to act, Bram and Michelle’s work provides a definitive guiding framework. My hope is that more follow and that we support, uplift, and protect these leaders in their important work.
This is exciting and important work. The Healing ARC framework is one of few interventions that address clinical and institutional racism with interventions that can leverage 21st century technology in real time while simultaneously providing data for tracking and holding clinicians and hospitals administrators accountable. Community voices in this framework are important components. Collaboration between the community and a hospital’s clinical and administrative staff makes the Healing ARC framework an exemplar intervention in the nation’s ongoing efforts to redress inequities in health and healthcare.
Health equity is not a zero-sum proposition. In fact, when we improve care for historically marginalized communities, we build better systems of care for everyone. The Healing ARC framework brings health professionals and communities together to explicitly address inequities by making changes to systems that are deemed meaningful by the community who has been adversely affected. We have seen demonstrated improvement using this kind of approach, which has helped to eliminate disparities that have persisted for decades.
Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.
Partnering with EqualHealth’s Campaign Against Racism
Equal Health is global community of health professionals, educators, and activists dedicated to the fight for health equity which transcends borders. We prepare health professionals to recognize the structural and social determinants of health and to engage in thoughtful, coordinated activism that addresses the root causes of poor health. Collectively, we are building a global movement of social medicine educators and practitioners who tackle health inequity in their institutions and in broader society.
Our Campaign Against Racism works to dismantle structural racism and its effects on health around the world by supporting local actions, efforts, and networks which aim to improve the health and lives of those most affected by racism, because racism kills.
The Campaign Against Racism is organized to uncover the historical connections between racism and capitalism to radically imagine a future in which sociocultural, political, and economic systems work towards health equity, rather than against it. We employ tactics of formalized reflection on the role of racial capitalism in each chapter’s work and experience.
