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Florida Non-Whites with Hypertension less likely to receive hospital care

By Lisa Zink, Contributing Writer
Health Behavior News Service

Even though more African-Americans patients reported getting a diagnosis of hypertension in Florida in 2001, they were less likely to receive hospital care than whites were, according to a new study.

However, non-whites were more likely to have hospitalizations for high blood pressure emergencies than whites were.

“It could be that black and Hispanic patients wait until it’s too late,” to go to the hospital, said study author WayWay Hlaing Ph.D., of the department of epidemiology and statistics at Florida International University.

Of all patients — emergency and non-emergency — hospitalized at Florida hospitals for high blood pressure problems, 57.1 percent were whites, 28.6 percent were African-Americans and 14.3 percent were Hispanics.

Hospitals discharged more whites to another facility than they did the African-American and Hispanic patients, but hospitals discharged the majority of patients in all three groups to home.

The study of 7,102 patients revealed significant differences in length of stay, discharge status and insurance type among the three racial/ethnic groups.

The proportions of emergency admissions were substantially higher for Hispanics and African-Americans. Hospitals admitted more than 75 percent of African-American patients in this study emergently, along with 73 percent of Hispanic patients. Comparatively, hospitals admitted a little over 64 percent of white patients for emergency reasons.

African-Americans and Hispanics were also more likely to be under- or uninsured than whites, according to the study in the Summer 2007 issue of the journal Ethnicity & Disease.

“Insurance status or lack thereof among minority patients may likely be the reason for lowered utilization and access to preventive care,” said Hlaing.

“The findings that non-Hispanic whites were more likely to be hospitalized than blacks and Hispanics, despite that blacks tend to have the highest prevalence of hypertension, point us right to the findings of the Institute of Medicine’s report from 2002,” said Luisa Borrell, Ph.D., referencing the report, “Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care.”

“Simply put, the treatment provided is not matching the population needs,” said Borrell, an assistant professor in the epidemiology department at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. She was not involved with this study.

“Equal access to preventive care via universal insurance coverage may lessen the disparity,” Hlaing suggested. “However, health education programs to increase awareness of the disease process and its complications and knowledge of disease management are also necessary to reduce the disparity in health outcomes.”