Access to primary medical care is closely associated with better health outcomes for patients, fewer hospital visits, and longer life spans. Yet in the United States, primary care spending for all payers accounted for merely 4.6% to 12.1% of total health care expenditures, depending on how broadly primary care is defined. For the first time, a national scorecard provides a deep dive into where primary care is lacking within a matrix of recommendations.

By Kathryn E. Phillips, Associate Director, California Health Care Foundation

Photo: Brett Perkinson receives his weekly supply of medically tailored meals delivered from a community-based organization to his home in Aptos, just outside of the city of Santa Cruz. Credit: Shmuel Thaler

Investment in primary care has the power to improve health equity more than any other part of our health care system. Immediate and concerted action is needed by payers serving the same communities to collaborate on how they pay for primary care to improve health equity and address disparities in care. Healthforce Center’s Director Dr. Sunita Mutha offered her expert insights on this December 2021 panel about how Californians can work together to realize a future vision for better primary care.

By Sunita Mutha, MD, FACP, Director of Healthforce Center

If 2020 was the year of a collective reckoning on racial injustice across the nation, then 2021 was the year of laser-like focus on how to redouble our efforts to advance equity and become more anti-racist. As Healthforce Center at UCSF will celebrate our 30th anniversary in 2022, we are taking extra time to review where we've been and where we are going.

Health systems are uniquely positioned to advance health equity by ensuring that their own workers are well, supported, and equipped to deliver high-quality care. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how work environments in health systems affect the well-being of workers, whose capacity to deliver safe, patient- and family-centered care plays a central role in achieving health.

Healthforce Center at UCSF is excited to announce that Dr. Elizabeth Mertz has been appointed Associate Director of Research to succeed Dr. Joanne Spetz. In this role, Mertz will be responsible for developing new research opportunities and cultivating faculty connections.

“Structural racism.” “Institutional racism.” “Societal racism.” These are phrases that we commonly hear today that signal acknowledgement of the breadth and depth with which white supremacy maintains power in our lives.

These terms also enable some of us, as individuals, to maintain distance between ourselves and “it.” By talking about racism as something larger, all encompassing, and immutable, people can at the same time excuse ourselves from confronting the many ways we uphold and reinforce racism, according to Dr. Monica Soni, Senior Medical Director at New Century Health.