Advancing Racial and Ethnic Equity in Long-Term Services and Supports
To optimize care access, delivery, and outcomes for all older adults, a high-performing long-term services and supports (LTSS) system that centers on equity is critical. Building this system will require a robust data infrastructure that, along with stakeholder engagement, allows for ongoing assessment of inequities and successful interventions to eliminate these inequities. Evidence describing how the health of racially and ethnically diverse older adults differs across states and LTSS settings will inform design improvements in these services and more efficient supportive measures, thereby improving health outcomes.
Moreover, within these interventions to improve equitable care for older adults, it is necessary to focus on building an empowered, well-compensated, educated workforce.
To this end, AARP Public Policy Institute (PPI) aims to highlight targeted research, data-driven interventions, and policy and practice reforms to achieve more equitable outcomes across LTSS for beneficiaries and family caregivers through AARP’s LTSS State Scorecard. The 2023 State Scorecard (set for release on September 28, 2023) looks across five domains: affordability and access, choice of care setting and provider, safety and quality, support for family caregivers, and community integration to measure state-level LTSS system performance from the viewpoint of older adults and their families.
This issue brief highlights research on inequities in LTSS related to the Scorecard’s five domains. This paper further outlines potential data sources to assess these inequities and discusses implications for the Scorecard and other available data sources.