According to the video, there are many implications that healthcare professionals face when treating diverse groups in America. It does not matter what healthcare profession you are in there is always going to be diversity with patients and not to forget the professional. In the video, “Unnatural Cases…Is inequality making us sick?” Dr. David and Dr. Collins who are both neonatologist, want to find out why there are more infant mortality, premature babies born to African American women than there are in White American women. Their first assumption was due to economic differences. In the case of Kim Anderson, it proved otherwise. Kim Anderson was a well-educated woman, who was living the American dream. She was well educated, took very good
As much as we would like to believe, since it is the twenty first century, race and ethnicity would never factor into the quality of an individual’s care, it unfortunately till this day still affects some individuals. There are countless of reports submit daily on races such as black and Latino. Forbes magazine reports in a study African- Americans, Latinos, and economically disadvantaged experience lower quality of care than white Americans; the worst part? This number is continuing to grow. Statistically, 35% of Latinos
The promotion of health is vastly switching into exposing what could be America's racist health care system. People have reason to believe that there are different health care for each race, gender, class, and sexuality. In A Conceptual Framework For Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality, by Lynn Weber, there is a suggestion of power relationships playing a role in different health care. Different health care is dictated by hierarchies determining who gets what kind of health care. Two positions are head-to-head with each other, "There are power hierarchies in which one group exerts control over another, securing its position of dominance in the system, and in which substantial material and nonmaterial resources-such as wealth, income, or access to health care and education-are at stake" (Weber, 20). An example of this is the Flint, Michigan water crisis. Flint, Michigan has pipes that do not produce healthy, nutritious water for residents, but instead gives out lead-poisoned water. The water crisis
The physician is expected to demonstrate an awareness of injustices pervasive throughout their local communities, as well as the global community. Moreover, the physician must exhibit dedication to the rectification of these inequities by leveraging their knowledge, resources and positions in order to lead, and to effect change. As an Ethiopian-Canadian, the issue of minority underrepresentation in healthcare is a matter that I find profoundly riveting. Clinical trials are often conducted utilizing cohorts lacking appropriate minority representation. This results in findings lacking suitable generalizability. As the practice of medicine is rooted in evidence garnered by such trials, this oversight results in the inevitable sub-standard care
The first issue that I learned after watching the health disparities video is despite similar levels of education and economic standing that African American women have the higher rates of infant mortality than Caucasian females with less education and a lower economic standing. The video theorized that this anomaly was most likely due to with experiences associated with racism. The video asserted that racism was a constant stressor and that neuroendocrine and sympathetic nervous system changes caused by stress could result in the gradual breakdown of the body and its systems.
When considering the American medical system, it is clear that the policy solutions for disparities occurring outside the clinical encounter
As a nurse aide working in a hospital, there are multiple instances where privilege and differences in power affect the way I, and those around me, engage with patients. For the privilege memo, I wish to discuss how my own personal benefits of being a white person affect the patients I work with as well as other minorities. For the community profile, I plan to take a deeper look into the black community, if possible specifically Somalian Americans. There are numerous new Somalian Americans in the Fargo community that I have encountered before both in and out of the health care systems. Delving into their experiences with health care in the America will aide my attempt to educate myself about minorities in health care environments both nationally and
Like previously stated, there has been a vast history of racial issues particularly in the medical field. These issues have led to minorities, especially African Americans, to not trust medical professionals and procedures. A study found in the Archives of Internal Medicine gives shocking results by stating that “African Americans were far less trusting than whites of the medical establishment and medical researchers in particular. African Americans were 79.2 percent more likely to believe that someone like them would be used as a guinea pig without his or her consent” (Clark 118). There are many cases in the past which would make a minority feel neglected and like a “guinea pig”. For instance, Henrietta Lacks, the main character of Rebecca Skloot’s book, was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951. Her doctors were shocked at the terrifying rate her tumor was growing (Skloot 117). Her cells were taken from her cervix and they were distributed world wide without her or her family’s consent. The distribution went on for years even after her death
Providers possess a multiplicity of roles in today’s society. It is typical that patients trust their physicians and should feel comfortable seeing them; however, not all communities can feel this way about their providers. Iatrophobia is prominent within the African-American community, and a history of medical abuses against this community may have a link to such present-day health inequalities as shorter life spans and higher infant mortality rates than Whites.
Passed down from generation to generation, African Americans have recounted the horror stories concerning the humiliation and abuse endured from the American medical community. The institution of systematic racism and discrimination leads Blacks further into a culture of untrusting those who have taken the sacred Hippocratic Oath. In the book Medical Apartheid author Harriet Washington (2006) uses the term “Black iatrophobia” to define the African American culture of being fearful of medicine; this fear is attributed to an extensive history of inhumane experimentation against the Black race in the United States from the days of colonial slavery to the era of modern medicine. “Health disparities adversely affect groups of people who have systematically experienced greater obstacles to health based on their racial or ethnic group” (Purnell, 2013, p. 6).
Health care disparities in the United States occur on the provider level. The implicit biases providers are susceptible to help shape physician behavior and produce differences in medical treatment across a host of demographic characteristics but mainly along the lines of race and ethnicity. This paper focuses mainly on the relationship between providers and Black Americans. There is a complex and historical relationship between providers and Black Americans which dates back to the 16th century that is the basis for the biases physicians exhibit towards this particular minority group in today’s healthcare system. Contrary to popular belief, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in 1932 is not the forerunner to a host of medical abuses committed against
The Institute of Medicine’s Report on Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial/Ethical Disparities in Health Care states that cultural bias is one contributor to racial and ethnic minorities having higher rates of poor health outcomes than Whites in the case of disease; even when income, employment
The mistreatment of the health care system needs to be addressed at multiple levels of analysis. Several studies have demonstrated that prejudice in the health care system at the interpersonal relationship with healthcare providers), institutional (quality of healthcare services and facilities) and the macrosystems levels (healthcare policies) contributes to health disparities (Wesley, 2009). For instance, a study found that Black women are far less likely (60%) to be referred for cardiac cauterization (which is considered the most accurate procedure of diagnosing heart conditions) than White men; considerably less than the disparity found for Black men and White women (40%) to be referred for cardiac cauterization compared to White men (Canto,
Discrimination and the differential quality of medical care African-Americans receive are seen in all levels of professional healthcare workers. Dr. Tweedy, a prominent psychiatrist and author of New York Times Bestseller A Black Man in a White Coat, has made claims about the difficulties and differences in healthcare treatment quality African-Americans receive (Weintraub, 2016). Studies from many medical professionals show that African-Americans face lesser quality and differential treatment due to social stigma and racial biases, whether these patients are in the Emergency Department, or seen by different health care professionals, such as registered nurses and surgical clinicians (Pletcher et. al, 2008; Haider et. al, 2015). The accumulation of discrimination, racial biases, and communication barriers between African-American patients and physicians are the reasons why African-Americans receive differential quality in medical care. The most effective way to improve and decrease these quality differences is to be proactive and educate health care workers by improving interpersonal skills and increasing awareness and cultural sensitivity training in both current and future healthcare professional workers.
That department, tucked away in the window-less bowels of the hospital, physically organized in a way in which the only direct contact its members had with the larger (almost entirely white) hospital staff was through a small window where doctors presented their records request, employed about 25 full time workers; all women, all but three (of which I was one) African American. It was the only time in my long work history (I made a career in advertising) in which I worked in a situation in which minorities were the majority, and the only time I worked under the supervision of an African American department head. (In fact, in a long career in business, in the nation's most liberal cities, it was one of only a very few times I worked with African Americans at all.) These (public sector) jobs provided my African American co-workers and supervisors' families -- almost all were married -- with stability that their husbands' less dependable and riskier work, in African American unions and their own small neighborhood businesses, couldn't on their own. In this, and in their hopes for their children, their respect for education, their desire for advancement, their professionalism and commitment they were absolutely no different than the white women I worked with over the next few decades, as work became less stable for white men too, and two incomes became a necessity for anything approaching the middle class in the white community. (Actually, they took their work much more seriously, and approached it with more professionalism, because unlike many working and middle class white women of my own generation, they didn't expect that a day would come when they could stay home with the kids and live off one, their husbands',
Hey Leon, I think that it would be great for minority practitioners and other health care professionals to practice in medically underserved areas to provide health care to vulnerable populations. To encourage health careers for individual or color, the wealthy black entrepreneur needs to reach out and give back to their communities by financially funding health scholarships and grants to help low-income families and minorities. In addition, programs need to be implemented to reach minority health professions students before they enter the job market through the loan repayment.