Empowered Patient Podcast Focusing on Health Equity to Sustain a More Resilient Population with Sam Meraj Walmart
Sam Meraj is the Senior Director of Quality, Safety, and Reporting at Walmart, including their in-store pharmacies, optical, primary care, dental, and other health services.
Sam explains, " We do keep in mind the social determinants of health. We provide a lot of linguistic support, language translation services, and we always keep health equity in mind when we are providing these services."
"I think a lot is being done to address health equity, but yet we have an opportunity to do a lot more. In terms of addressing the language barriers that I was talking about or the cultural barriers to continued education, one thing to keep in mind is that negative experiences with healthcare are unfortunately more common in these groups. And some social determinants of health, again, have historically made it difficult for them to have equal access to healthcare. So I think that it's important for individual providers as well as systems to be aware and intentional about addressing these gaps and sharing the right information to build trust and address some of these disparities."
#Walmart #SDOH #SocialDeterminantsofHealth #HealthEquity #COVID19 #PopulationHealth