The Institute’s People Reports and Research
This page lists projects that most directly affect people. Ultimately,
all public policy involves people, and this is especially true in
environment and agriculture. Visit the other policy issue area pages
to find additional projects.
Health Disparities
Public health is one of the core policy issue areas identified in
the Institute’s series Living
in the Rocky Mountain West, 2025. As Colorado moves forward
with healthcare reform efforts, both comprehensive and more targeted,
the issue of health disparities must be included in the dialogue.
Health disparities are the persistent differences in health outcomes
(i.e., access, disease, disability, and death) across many areas of
health over time because of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation,
geography, environment, workplace, education, or socioeconomic status.
The Colorado Institute of Public Policy began exploring the problem
of health disparities in 2006 by holding a series of meetings with
over 50 community leaders to discuss breakdowns in communication,
understanding, and information among health stakeholders. These
breakdowns result in decisions and actions that appear appropriate
and helpful to one group of stakeholders, but inappropriate or even
problematic for other stakeholders. The resulting policy
brief
Systems of Care
The welfare system is comprised of a myriad of service providers,
located in different public institutions, unevenly distributed around
their counties, with different eligibility requirements. Given
the complexity of services often needed for families in crisis, the
Systems of Care (SOC) model, initially implemented in mental health
systems, provides an integrated approach to better meet the needs
of children and families that enter the social welfare system.
To help a Colorado county create an integrated social service delivery
system, it was necessary to discover the variety of government, non-profit,
and faith-based social service resources unknown to the county. The
Institute combined two techniques to identify the resources -- cognitive
mapping and Geographic Information System (GIS) -- and analyzed the
availability, capacity, and distribution of social services.
The
summary and
full reports provide the results of the resource identification
project. Over 1800 new resources were identified and provided
the basis for developing a comprehensive community-based delivery
system. More