[1] Patient-centered care is also one of the overreaching goals of health advocacy, in addition to safer medical systems, and greater patient involvement in healthcare delivery and design.
[2] Health advocates play a pivotal role in facilitating patient-centered care by ensuring that healthcare systems accommodate diverse cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic needs.
For instance, health advocates working with immigrant populations often address critical barriers such as language gaps, lack of access to interpreters, and unfamiliarity with healthcare navigation processes.
Evidence-based practices in advocacy have demonstrated improved outcomes when healthcare providers and advocates collaborate to implement tailored communication strategies, including multilingual resources and cultural competence training for medical staff.
Research highlights that embedding such advocacy within healthcare institutions has led to measurable improvements in patient satisfaction, treatment adherence, and health outcomes in underserved populations.
Furthermore, health advocates have increasingly focused on racial and socioeconomic disparities, emphasizing policy changes aimed at equitable distribution of healthcare resources.
Research underscores that these efforts have contributed to improved health equity, reduced mortality rates, and increased preventive care utilization in marginalized communities.
These advocacy initiatives often involve multifaceted approaches, including lobbying for policy reforms, conducting public awareness campaigns, and partnering with community organizations to implement sustainable changes.
Digital health advocates now play a critical role in ensuring equitable access to telehealth services, especially for rural and underserved populations.
Additionally, digital health advocates collaborate with healthcare providers to develop user-friendly telemedicine platforms that comply with data privacy regulations.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth usage surged, and evidence suggests it significantly enhanced access to care for patients with chronic illnesses, mental health needs, and other conditions.
Health advocates focus on implementing programs such as free or subsidized internet access, digital literacy workshops, and public funding initiatives to expand telemedicine's reach.
Advocacy in this sector is essential to ensuring that digital healthcare remains an integral, equitable part of modern medical systems.
[11] They were activists in social movements and voluntary associations including civic organizations, women's associations and labor organizations, and in the early disease-specific non-profits like the American Cancer Society (founded as the American Society for the Control of Cancer in 1913) or the March of Dimes (founded as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in 1938).
In the early part of the 20th century these advocates came to their work through other professional routes, often as social workers, attorneys, public health nurses or doctors.
They were the Progressive era "new women" of Hull House and the Children's Bureau,[12] the American Association for Labor Legislation[13] leaders of the movement in 1919 for national health insurance, the nurses who worked with Lillian Wald to advocate for indigent health care through Visiting Nurse Services[14] (1893), or with the Maternity Center Association[15] (1918) to advocate for maternal and infant care for poor immigrants.
The Love Canal Homeowners Association, for example, was founded in 1978 by Lois Gibbs and others concerned about the high rate of cancer and birth defects in the community.
The Newtown Florist Club on the south side of Gainesville, Georgia was founded by women who pooled their money to buy wreaths for funerals in their community; in the 1980s they began to recognize that there were "far too many deaths due to cancer and lupus in the neighborhood.
Individuals, some with backgrounds such as nursing or case management, and others who had experience helping loved ones or friend navigate the healthcare system, began establishing private practices to provide those services to client-patients.
Each year, more organizations, including colleges and universities offer such programs, satisfying the needs of the many people who are turning to careers in patient and health advocacy.
[26] In 2015, the University of Illinois at Chicago created the Legislative Education and Advocacy Development (LEAD) Experience to train inter-professional groups of pediatrics residents, public health students, and fourth-year medical students to think critically about health care, analyze policy, and communicate effectively about policy through the method of legislative briefing.