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Neighborhood and the Built Environment

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Social Emergency Medicine

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Abstract

Emergency department patients' neighborhoods and their built environments shape a substantial portion of their health outcomes. A neighborhood’s built environment includes access to both community and health care resources as well as exposure to various types of risk. Understanding variability in these patterns of access and risk are important goals in social emergency medicine. Emergency providers and systems that explore these patterns within a community can arrive at targeted interventions and prevention efforts to improve individual and population health. On a broader scale, the built environment lays bare some of the most glaring disparities within our society; understanding and responding to how patients and communities interact with their built environment is a key step to addressing health equity. A patient’s built environment involves the social, political, and health resources in their community, and this chapter focuses on how this environment shapes -- and responds to -- patients’ clinical presentations to the emergency department.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Emergency Medicine, Keck School of Medicine of USC, LAC+USC, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Daniel A. Dworkis

  2. Department of Emergency Medicine, Highland Hospital – Alameda Health System, Oakland, CA, USA

    Erik S. Anderson

Authors
  1. Daniel A. Dworkis
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  2. Erik S. Anderson
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Emergency Medicine, Highland Hospital, Alameda Health System, Oakland, CA, USA

    Harrison J. Alter

  2. Division of Emergency Medicine, Saint Louis University School of Medicine, Saint Louis, MO, USA

    Preeti Dalawari

  3. Departments of Emergency Medicine and Population Health, NYU School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA

    Kelly M. Doran

  4. Department of Emergency Medicine, University of California, Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Maria C. Raven

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Dworkis, D.A., Anderson, E.S. (2021). Neighborhood and the Built Environment. In: Alter, H.J., Dalawari, P., Doran, K.M., Raven, M.C. (eds) Social Emergency Medicine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65672-0_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65672-0_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-65671-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-65672-0

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