Primary Submission Category: Place/Communities
Access to Healthcare among Muslims in Southeast Michigan: A Systems Approach
Authors: Erum Ikramullah, Ayaz Hyder, Zaynab Qatu, Mohammad Muntakim,
Presenting Author: Sajeela Munir*
This research aims to address the experiences of Muslims in Southeast Michigan facing barriers to accessing healthcare by providing research-based tools and recommendations grounded in local context, expertise, and experiences. A 2022 survey by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) showed that a majority (62%) of Muslims in America have experienced religious-based discrimination in the past year.
Community-based system dynamics (CBSD) is an approach to understanding broad, complex problems. We used CBSD in this study to address the problem of access to healthcare among minority populations in SE Michigan. The problem of access to healthcare is multi-faceted given how many different dimensions there are to this issue, such as affordability, insurance status, availability of transportation, and prior experiences with healthcare providers. This methodology is community-based in that researchers engage with participants through facilitated workshops to identify the problem, identify the interconnected parts of the system impacting the problem, and identify solutions. This ensures that insights from the research are grounded in the local context, expertise, and experience. The workshop activities led to several key visual diagrams illustrating community input into how different parts of the system interact to influence access to healthcare.
The report also includes six recommendations and a set of policy options based on the information obtained and analyzed from the workshop activities and community interviews. These recommendations and policy options, which are grounded in the experience of the local community, offer a blueprint for interested and motivated individuals and non-profit, community-based, and governmental organizations to collaboratively work toward closing the gaps and addressing inequities in the health, healthcare, and well-being of American Muslims and other communities in Southeast Michigan.
This research empowers communities in the United States with an innovative playbook on how to bring together multiple stakeholders from multiple sectors to solve a complex community challenge (e.g., Islamophobia, access to health care, Islamic education, and community resiliency) using a systems approach. Systems are the sum of their parts and when no one sector or organization can solve or address a complex community challenge then systems-level innovations provide a way forward as long as there is the capacity and resources to do so.