2022 Health Equity Summit Recap of the Presentation

2022 Health Equity Summit

Partnerships in Action

Pathways to Health Equity

Purpose

The summit will convene a diversity of stakeholders and offer opportunity to learn together and foster collaborations and a strategic framework for tackling both the systems and social determinants impacting health outcomes for all New Mexicans.

Objectives

• Energize a collective vision and collective action that draw from lessons learned and best practices
  from diverse communities across New Mexico.
• Establish trust based on listening to community partners through their stories and collective
  mapping of historical injustices.
• Produce actionable items for partners and scheduled commitments for follow-up to collective
  practice, process, action, innovation, and systems and policy outcomes.
• Align health equity solutions with strategic actions, policy priorities and resources.
• Produce an Equity Manifesto that embodies collective input from the summit.

Why now?

The Health Equity Summit comes at a critical moment. Long-term structural inequities have been
exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic placing additional hardship and burdens on communities of color
and rural and under-resourced populations in New Mexico. Racial and ethnic minority populations are more
likely to contract COVID-19, be hospitalized and die, and in some cases, are less likely to be tested and
vaccinated. Food insecurity, poverty, discrimination, racism, lack of access to health care, unemployment,
geographic isolation, overcrowded multi-family units, inadequate water and basic sanitation are among the
social determinants impacting the health of New Mexico’s communities.

Additionally, the history of colonization in New Mexico and the resultant historical traumas create
complexities that must be acknowledged as a starting place as we embark on this process to understand
health and equity in our communities of color. Since intersectoral and community efforts have made a
difference, the Health Equity Summit will provide a time to connect and collaborate on strategic actions to
advance community health, well-being, and equity for all New Mexicans.