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War on Health Disparities Gets New Battlefront: The Workplace

America’s team of doctors, nurses, researchers, epidemiologists and other health care professionals working to reduce long-standing disparities in health outcomes between majority and minority populations is about to be joined by an unusual new player: corporate employers.

The Washington Business Group on Health (WBGH), a national non-profit organization representing large private- and public-sector employers who provide health care benefits for their workers, has launched the WBGH Health Disparities Initiative: Promoting Health for a Culturally Diverse Workforce, designed to help close the gap in health care access, treatment and quality between whites and minorities in today’s increasingly multi-ethnic workplace. WBGH’s members include such household-name Fortune 500 firms as Bank of America, IBM, AT&T, Procter & Gamble and DuPont.

With people of color expected to make up 41.5% of the entering workforce between 1998 and 2008, the WBGH initiative aims to provide employers with a full arsenal of resources for planning and purchasing health care benefits for an ethnically diverse workforce. These will include briefing papers on health disparities, culturally competent health education materials for minority employees, best-practice guidelines, employee health surveys, “solutions workshops” and an online resource center.

As one of the first steps in the initiative, WBGH is partnering with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. to implement a pilot project with selected WBGH members. Health teams from three Pfizer divisions will work with WBGH to develop an employer toolkit for cardiovascular disease prevention and management, one of the six focus areas of the federal government’s Initiative to Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health.

For more information, see WBGH’s Web site, www.wbgh.org, or contact Rea Pañares at (202) 585-1500, panares@wbgh.org.