OHEMH

The ADPH Office of Health Equity and Minority Health (OHEMH): Establishing and Maintaining a Culture of Health Equity

"Bringing vision and imagination through a multisector frame to achieve equity in health" is the mission of the Alabama Department of Public Health’s Office of Health Equity and Minority Health—an established priority area for the ADPH.

The Alabama Department of Public Health, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recognizes that health equity is achieved when every person has the opportunity to “attain his or her full health potential” and no one is “disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or other socially determined circumstances.” Health inequities are reflected in differences in length of life; quality of life; rates of disease, disability, and death; severity of disease; and access to treatment.

The re-envisioned Office of Minority Health is the newly established Office of Health Equity and Minority Health (OHEMH), located in the Office of Governmental Affairs and Community Relations. The OHEMH, with stakeholder input, has developed a 3-year blueprint for elevating health equity as a priority in Alabama.

The OHEMH 2021-2024 Strategic Plan mirrors the mission and vision of the Agency through an equity lens. Utilizing reliable data to identify communities at the highest risk of health disparities and inequities, the ADPH OHEMH and its partners seek to deliver intentional strategies that will build health equity into daily practices. The OHEMH Strategic Plan has both an internal and external focus.

What's New?

The ADPH Office of Health Equity and Minority Health worked with the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind to develop training addressing special populations during public health emergencies. Learn more.

OHEMH Strategic Goals

The following outlines the internal and external goals of the OHEMH:

Goal 1. Establish common language that ADPH staff can use when communicating health equity strategies, applying an equity lens in daily work activities, and operationalizing health equity-specific public health best practices throughout the Agency.

Goal 2. Work with federal partners and OIDA (Office of Informatics and Data Analytics) to improve race and ethnicity data collection. This will allow the OHEMH to use data more effectively to plan, monitor, and measure the impact of ADPH health equity activities.

Goal 3. Utilize external partnerships established through the CDC Health Disparity Grant Sub-grantees to build stakeholder capacity, advise on equity-focused work, and establish common language when recommending health equity strategies. This cooperative will not only address pandemic-related health disparities but also better equip communities to handle future public health emergencies.

Goal 4. Report annually on progress toward addressing health disparities, building awareness of health equity, and increasing training around health literacy for the improvement of health outcomes across Alabama.