No More Bias In Health Care by Realina

No More Bias In Health Care by Realina - June 2020 Scholarship Essay

Imagine being in a room with doctors and nurses surrounding you telling you what will happen with your healthcare and not understanding a single word. Imagine the emotions that will shutter through your body as they keep talking, and all you hear is gibberish. Imagine trying to communicate the best you can, and all you feel is ignored, not cared for, and alone. When graduating in the year 2023 with a BSN in nursing, I want to bring change with how we treat patients, especially minorities. Coming from a Latinx household, I understand how a language barrier can affect healthcare and the attitude of the patients with a language barrier. Two years ago, I went to a doctor's appointment with my Abuela and father. She began to become very frustrated when the doctor would try to explain things, and she wouldn't understand. My Abuela would look at my father with a confused face and then have him translate for her.
Now imagine other individuals with a different background or language barriers being affected by this with no help, no one to look over to and ask to translate. Frustration, confusion, and anxiety would build up when having people dictate your health care plan to you without knowing a single word. As a healthcare worker, I have witnessed this first hand, as well. I have walked into many patients' rooms, asking if they are finished with their food tray, and they stare at me with a blank look saying something in their home language that I do not understand. They notice, so they stop speaking, so they shake their head in some direction to attempt to communicate. Yes, I know hospitals try their best with communication and translators, but translators can not be in the patient's room 24/7. As an individual who is furthering their education in health care, I want to be an advocate for everyone from different backgrounds and cultures to feel accepted by their healthcare providers. I do not want a straightforward thing like a language barrier to make a patient feel ignored, lonely, and lost.
African Americans are also affected by bias from the healthcare community. Individuals still believe that African Americans feel less pain or often lie about their pain to health care staff; this results in way more mortality in African Americans than Caucasians in the health care system. In a study, the researchers found that when African Americans had the same pain levels as Caucasians, the African American was treated with less pain medicine than the Caucasian individual despite having the same pain levels (Hoffman, Trawalter, Axt and Oliver, 2020). Some medical students believe that "black people's skin is thicker than white people's skin" (Hoffman, Trawalter, Axt and Oliver, 2020), thus resulting in more inadequate care to an African American individual. Having racial bias too any race can create a lousy patient to healthcare worker environment.
The fact that racial prejudice still exists in health care scares me, and this makes me scared for future patients, my friends, and family due to myself being a minority as well. Racial bias in health care should not exist at all, but sadly they still do in 2020, and I want to be a health care worker who provokes a change. I will make sure all my patients regardless of their sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, culture, ethnicity, and beliefs. I want all the individuals I come in contact with to feel heard and cared for, not misunderstood or mistreated. I want to be the individual who stomps their foot down and makes a change even in my school. I believe even as a student, and I can make these changes by advocating for minorities in health care when I begin clinical in the fall semester. I was racial bias out and inclusive and accepting health care in, and I will be that change.

References

Hoffman, K. M., Trawalter, S., Axt, J. R., & Oliver, M. N. (2016). Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(16), 4296–4301. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1516047113