Nurses play various roles within the nurse-patient relationship. Some of these roles include decision maker, care giver, communicator, and lastly, one of the most prominent roles, an advocator. To be an advocator means to actively support and promote patient equality and health. A recent and relevant way that nurses have begun advocating for their patients that is worth recognizing is the advocacy for health equity. According to the CDC, healthy equity is defined as, “The state in which everyone has a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health” (CDC, 2022). Providing the public with an equitable health care system is essential to developing an overall healthier population that requires less health care, essentially lowering health care costs.
The National Academy of Medicine published a report in 2021 regarding health disparity in all of its forms and the responsibilities that nurses carry to end health disparity and promote health equity. This report does an effective job at highlighting the significance of health equity and the ways in which it would inherently have an overall positive impact on public health outcomes. According to the 2021 report, the essentiality of promoting health equity is to promote a thriving, healthy nation. “A nation cannot fully thrive
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The World Health Organization (WHO) defines the social determinants of health as “…the non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life” (WHO, 2023). The 5 social determinants of health include: economic stability, education, social and community context, health and health care, and neighborhood and built