Minority Groups in Healthcare Work Field Face Discrimination

Healthcare providers such as medical doctors, physician assistants, nurses, and many more poured endless of hours getting their degrees and perfecting their skills to save lives. Even when achieving high level of education, they still face discrimination because of their color, race, gender, and sexual orientation.

According to Syed, Redmond, Bussey-Jones, Price-Haywood, & Genao (2018), 60% of physicians surveyed who were primarily women of color reported experiencing discrimination in the workplace. In particular, 33% of female clinician researchers reported sexual harassment, 15% of LGBTQ physicians experienced denial of patient referrals, while 25% of physicians reported quitting at least one job due to discrimination in the work field.

Discrimination in the healthcare work field still exists today. Dr. Esther Choo, who is an emergency medicine physician at OHSU in Portland, Oregon shared her experience with racism as a response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia two years ago (Swindler, 2017). Dr. Choo stated that she has been denied by some patients in the emergency room due to her race and have chosen to receive treatment from a white intern instead despite her having more than a decade of experience.

Source: Dr. Esther Choo's Tweet 

Dr. Choo mentioned how "there are those wow moments, when you undress a trauma patient and there's Confederate tattoos or swastika tattoos, and you just kind of look at each other” (Swindler, 2017). She continued, “and there has to be this very conscious decision to separate out your gut reaction to those things and how you're proceeding with that patient's clinical care”. Doctors were trained to focus on medical treatments and saving people’s lives without discriminating against patient’s race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, income status, and religion. However, it is unjustified for these healthcare providers to experience this kind of prejudice.

On a Delta flight from Indianapolis to Boston, Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford witnessed a passenger experiencing medical crisis and offered assistance (Hauser, 2018). Stanford, who is a black physician, tried to help the woman while a flight attendant questioned her credentials. Even after showing her medical license, other flight attendants came in to check her license once again and asked “Is this your license?” Despite being a Harvard Medical School instructor who practices obesity medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Stanford’s credentials did not seem to convince them enough to end persisting questions.

Source: Dr. Tamika Cross' Facebook post

Although some patients face racial bias from healthcare providers, employees in the medical field also experience this type of implicit bias from patients and other staff as well. Sharing stories like how Dr. Choo and Dr. Stanford encountered racial bias opens a new perspective for other people. It’s important to inform the public regarding the diversity in the medical field and how healthcare providers from minority groups deserve the same treatment as any other human being.

To learn more about racial implicit bias and how to overcome it, click here.

References:
Hauser, C. (2018, November 02). 'Are You Actually an M.D.?': A Black Doctor Is Questioned as She Intervenes on a Delta Flight. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/us/delta-black-doctor-racial-profiling.html 

Swindler, S. (2017, August 16). Portland doctor Esther Choo Responds to Racism in the Emergency Room (Column). Retrieved from https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2017/08/portland_doctor_responds_to_ra.html

Syed, Q., Redmond, N., Bussey-Jones, J., Price-Haywood,E., & Genao, I., (2018, July). Coping with Harassment and Discrimination in Health Care: A primer for leadership. Retrieved from https://www.sgim.org/File%20Library/SGIM/Resource%20Library/Forum/2018/SGIM-July-4.pdf