A recent state of Illinois report says racism is a public health crisis and many health issues are exacerbated by a lack of access to needed care.

The State Health Improvement Plan is part of a larger five-year plan that Illinois officials will use to outline and address the major public health issues facing the state.  

That larger plan, Healthy Illinois 2028, lays out five primary public health issues:

• Racism as a public health crisis.
• Maternal and infant health.
• Mental health and substance use disorders.
• Chronic disease.
• COVID-19 and emerging diseases.

Dr. Sameer Vohra, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, said that the COVID-19 pandemic revealed there were significant health disparities beyond just those that were based on the biology of this virus. 

“What we also know is that there are substantial health disparities around different groups especially Black, African-Americans, Hispanics when you think about issues such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes,” Vohra said. “In order to address those issues, we had to call out that there needs to be something beyond just the disease state that is making these things happen. It allows us to explore that and get to the answers to close those gaps and disparities.”

Vohra said the plan will involve community engagement and work toward building solutions.

“We want this plan to be a journey, one where we’re engaging with stakeholders, community leaders,” Vohra said. “How do we create the community-led, community-built solutions to get to our goals and what we’re beginning to do is create the action plan and implementation strategies to turn this from a document to something that really creates the kind of change that we want to see, especially learning lessons that we learned from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Dilbreet Raju of Capitol News Illinois contributed.