Recism and Health

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The Influence of the Ecological Model on Racism and Health
The ecological model is based on the notion that no single aspect can explain why some individuals are subjected to a particular risk. Racism influences health as it subjects an individual to stress that leads to multiple medical complications issues. Small biases such as being belittled due to racial background can lead to a host of health issues such as clinical depression, poor sleep, obesity, and heart diseases. This is especially experienced in African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. The core concept of the ecological model is that multiple levels in health care influence health and racism (UNICEF 4). They include intrapersonal/individual factors, interpersonal, organizational/institutional, community and public elements.
Racial health inequalities have been fully entranced in the healthcare system. The ecological model recognizes that those who experience racism on the basis of social and class factors. At the Interpersonal level, the main factors include knowledge, attitudes, development history, skills, behavior, and beliefs of an individual, age, ethnicity, and other factors (UNICEF 4). All these influences how a person might be subjected to racism and as well impact the health outcomes.
At the Interpersonal level, family, friends and colleagues network, roommates, and supervisors impact health. People cope up with this racism by receiving social support from friends, families (UNICEF 3).

People who are subjected to racism often elicit behaviors such as substance abuse, risky sexual activities while some patients at times forgo medications and seek alternative ways to avoid encountering biases.
At the Institution level, factors are inclusive of rules, policies, regulations as well as informal structures that can either promote or limit healthy behaviors (UNICEF 4). These regulations can either impact the cleanliness of the environment or safety. Minority communities have often been segregated in schools, workplace and even in the neighborhood. At the same time these groups have suffered environmental injustices including exposure to environmental toxins, and yet they have few social amenities such as hospitals. This level of residential and occupational segregation can lead to health inequalities.
At the community level, the main factors in the ecological model include the location of a community, its neighborhood associations, and environment (UNICEF 4). Poor residents from minority groups are unable to access quality and affordable health care. It has contributed to the healthcare disparities across ethnic and racial groups which have led to a high mortality rate. Finally, at the public level, factors such as global, state, federal and local policies and laws regulate and even support health actions. With the passage of legislative laws such as Civil Right Acts, that may facilitate the construction of hospitals in poor racial communities results would be a higher survival rate of racially marginalized groups.
Works Cited
UNICEF. “Module 1: Understanding The Social Ecological Model (SEM) And Communication For Development (C4D).” Unicef.Org, 2018, https://www.unicef.org/cbsc/files/Module_1_SEM-C4D.docx. Accessed 27 Oct 2018