How Representation in Healthcare Makes Patient Treatment Better

Edited by Catherine Verdeflor

The phrase “Your perception is your reality” was coined by Lee Atwater in the 1980s and hasn’t stopped being used since. Ironically, different individuals have different interpretations of this quote, but here is the most common one: you can never truly doubt or understand someone else’s experiences because you have never undergone them with their approach. Additionally, you can’t say one person was wrong for hating an event because the other loved it, as you do not know what experiences led them to perceive it that way. The fashion in which people grasp ideas can be affected by characteristics like gender, race, or cultural background. This is why representation is so important in the medical field. Lack of diversity in the medical field staff leads many patients from different cultural backgrounds and realities to be disregarded as the professionals view them differently or don’t understand them. The incorporation of diversity in medical staff has many benefits, including more healthcare equity for minorities and higher patient satisfaction.

Minorities are affected by health disparities at disproportionate rates than their white counterparts. There are many reasons for this, but the root cause is the lack of diversity in the healthcare workforce, resulting in cultural incompetence. In other words, the staff consists solely of one culture and race, thus leading trouble in understanding the hundreds of culturally different patients they treat. This causes them to perpetuate biases and stereotypes instead of learning the cultures to understand their patients, providing a decreased level of care. Furthermore, this manifests itself in various ways, including how black and Hispanic patients are less likely to receive pain medication for the same condition as their white counterparts, “African-American women are twice as likely to die from cervical cancer than white women,” and black newborns are three times as likely to die in white physicians care (Cohen, Gabriel, & Terrell, 2002, para. 10). On top of that, underserved communities almost always correlate with dense minority populations. According to Health Affairs, “Abundant data now exist documenting that African American, Hispanic, and Native American physicians are much more likely than white physicians are to practice in underserved communities and to treat larger numbers of minority patients, irrespective of income” (Cohen, Gabriel, & Terrell, 2002, para. 8). To add on, patients typically feel more comfortable being with physicians that understand them and look like them. If patient satisfaction is supposed to be one of healthcare’s #1 goals, more diversity needs to be implemented in the staff.

Lack of diversity in the medical field will be an ongoing pandemic until resolved. There are few solutions, which includes recruiting and hiring more minorities into hospitals, dentistries, clinics, and more, as well as addressing the stereotypes and biases around minority patients and staff members. Everyone must play their part. It may not seem like a lot to some, but to others that small step feels huge, and we can’t tell them it isn’t. After all, their perception is their reality.

References:

Cohen, J. J., Gabriel, B. A, & Terrel, C. (1 September 2002). “The Case For Diversity In The Healthcare Workforce.” Health Affairs, 21(5). doi:10.1377

[Untitled image of medical professionals]. EDUMED. https://www.edumed.org/medical-careers/diversity-in-healthcare/