Milken researchers write editorial on racism in the healthcare industry – The GW Hatchet

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Earlier this month, two researchers from the Milken Institute School of Public Health wrote an editorial analyzing systemic racism in the healthcare industry, marked by income inequality and lack of diversity.

The editorial, which the American Public Health Association published in the journal Medical Care, assessed the inequalities in pay and access to education that prevent blacks, Latinos and Indigenous people from accessing jobs and in management positions in the medical field. The authors propose five evidence-based policies, including plans to recognize the history of racism in medicine, promote policies that explore diversity in medical leadership positions, and invest in pipeline programs that encourage marginalized communities to enter. in the medical field.

Anushree Vichare, assistant professor in the department of health management and policy, and Randl Dent, researcher and equity specialist, led the editorial alongside Jaileessa Casimir, medical student at City University of New York.

It was time to go beyond simply describing the situation and context and really trying to identify more concrete measures, Vichare said. Now is the time to act. We’ve talked a lot, now it’s really time to take the walk.

People of color make up 37% of health and social assistance workers nationwide, according to 2020 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to the office, only 17.4% of workers are black or African-American and 13.6% are Hispanic or Latino.

Vichare said his teams’ research is part of a larger effort by people of color in the medical community to tackle racist policies and unequal representation still embedded in the medical system.

There must be a movement to recognize that structural racism among health workers is not just a problem for doctors and medical schools, Vichare said.

She said medical institutions should be held accountable for carrying out the anti-racist work they pledge to do.

The School of Medicine and Health Sciences formed an anti-racist coalition last summer to tackle racism and implicit prejudice, organizing events to educate people about implicit prejudices and the under-representation of minorities in the personal health.

Dent said the editorial aims to recognize how, historically, black colleges and universities have worked to bring doctors of color into the workforce.

The editorial suggests that medical companies invest in schools with black, Latino and indigenous students. The authors provide CommonSpiritHealth, a nonprofit medical organization that recently invested in the Morehouse School of Medicine, an HBCU as an example.

We really saw this as an opportunity to invest in HBCUs and invest in Hispanic institutions that diversify the workforce, more than any other school, she said. And so that was one of the things that we really wanted to highlight schools that do and do it well.

She said HBCUs like Howard University College of Medicine, Meharry Medical College and Morehouse School of Medicine included three of the top five schools that graduate the country’s blackest medical students.

Casimir said the authors researched the history of racist medical policies before coming up with any solutions spelled out in the editorial. She said the editorial also spoke of the 1910 Flexner Report, a landmark report on the higher education of medical schools that led to the closure of seven of the 10 medical schools that trained black doctors with limited funding.

The health structures and inequalities we see today are due to what happened in the past, Casimir said. How can we dismantle these systems if we don’t even know where their foundation is?

Experts in medicine and public health have said structural racism is ingrained in the medical system through hiring practices, unequal access to healthcare facilities and high costs.

Janet Bettger, associate professor of orthopedics and nursing at Duke University, said the editorial is extremely important because it identifies pipeline programs in high schools targeting students from rural and marginalized communities.

I appreciated that they were very specific about how they wrote this about wage inequality, about the debt, about the opportunities, about the learning, about the discussions, Bettger said.

Thomas LaVeist, dean of the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and former chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at Milken, said the United States was significantly separated in the healthcare industry. He said that different racial and ethnic groups receive medical care of varying quality and there are fewer health facilities located near people in rural areas.

Providers use the same incentives as everyone else, and that’s why you see some communities have an overabundance of health care resources and other communities have essentially no health care resources, a t -he declares.

Sarah Hendrick contributed reporting.

This article appeared in the October 11, 2021 issue of Hatchet.

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