Vulnerable Population Paper

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Vulnerable Populations From a medical or health care perspective, the term “vulnerability” refers to a person or a population’s susceptibility to poor health (Shi & Stevens, 2021). Vulnerable populations in the U.S. are typically described as “described as disadvantaged, underprivileged, medically underserved, poverty stricken, distressed populations, and the underclasses” (Shi & Stevens, 2021). Lacking a clear definition for vulnerable populations in general, researchers and policy makers, when discussing population vulnerability, usually focus on distinct subpopulations, such as racial/ethnic minorities, people of low social-economic status, the uninsured, children, the elderly, the physically or mentally ill, migrants or the newly immigrated, …show more content…
since the founding of this nation, it did not exist for certain vulnerable populations, such as slaves, women and blacks/colored people, until specific legislation was passed to protect these populations, i.e., emancipating the slaves, granting women the right to vote, and prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, and national origin (Stone, 2012). Equality is still far from the reality in the U.S. today, let alone equity. When people are making decisions regarding health interventions and health policies, they can be influenced by both explicit biases and implicit biases (Sabin, 2022). Explicit biases are acknowledged attitudes and assumptions in one’s personal belief systems, such as overt racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes, which can lead to discriminative acts during health inventions and discriminative decisions when developing and implementing health policies (Sabin, 2022). Explicit biases are relatively easy to spot and can be assessed directly by ways of self-reporting, e.g., surveys and questionnaires (Sabin, …show more content…
As a result, subjective decisions are made for health interventions and health policies, which lead to health disparities (Sabin, 2022; Gonzalez et al., 2021). When reviewing the “Who Gets the Heart” case study, implicit or unconscious biases such as stereotypes, prejudices, and age discrimination, may be at play when making decisions on which candidate gets the heart. First, due to the subjective value and priority that I placed over children and family relationships over medical suitability of the candidates, I selected Rick Ripley, the dairy farmer, because Rick is the father of three young children aged 7, 11, and 16, while the other two candidates, Mickey Federici and Josie Morris, are adults without children. Furthermore, my stereotype of the father role led me to assume that Rick is supporting his children financially and is a loving father to them, without any actual evidentiary
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