Steinberg Michael L
21st Century Oncology at the Santa Monica Cancer Treatment Center, Santa Monica, CA, USA.
Semin Radiat Oncol. 2008 Jul;18(3):161-7. doi: 10.1016/j.semradonc.2008.01.003.
The inequitable delivery of health care leads to differences in health outcomes for certain groups, particularly minorities and the poor that are described by the public health policy term disparity. Initially understood in racial/ethnic terms, disparity is now known as having its roots in poverty and the lack of social and medical infrastructure to equitably address the needs of affected patient groups. Powerful tools of health services research and the quality discipline have accurately described, and to a great extent explained, the disparity problem. Quality of care and disparity are integrally related concepts that benefit from the coordination of interventions to address the structural and process-based deficits in the health care delivery system that are the root cause of disparity.
医疗保健的不公平提供导致某些群体，特别是少数族裔和贫困人口的健康结果存在差异，这就是公共卫生政策术语“差距”所描述的情况。差距最初是从种族/族裔角度来理解的，现在人们知道它根源在于贫困以及缺乏公平满足受影响患者群体需求的社会和医疗基础设施。卫生服务研究和质量学科的有力工具已经准确描述，并在很大程度上解释了差距问题。医疗质量和差距是紧密相关的概念，通过协调干预措施来解决医疗服务提供系统中基于结构和过程的缺陷（这些缺陷是差距的根本原因），二者都将从中受益。
