Discrimination in the healthcare system
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Discrimination in the healthcare system
The problem
The COVID-19 global trajectories made it clear that care and well-being are not the same
for everyone. Medical systems across the United States Are becoming more concerned about
recognizing and dealing with health determinants, including the human and ecological issues that
may affect a public's ability and the disparities in health and health effects among clusters (Nguyen
et al., 2018). Much research has found several factors linked to differences in therapeutic
interventions, consequences, and death rates based on race, gender, social class, and other patterns
of interaction. Some of these are disagreements between patients and doctors, bias on the part of
doctors, and daily experiences of discrimination. Even though a lot is known about how
discrimination impacts healthcare, there needs to be more interventions to help people who are
discriminated against realize it or have experienced it in the healthcare system.
Statistic of the problem
Even though healthcare disparities have been known about and written about for a long
time, the population's well-being has improved. However, differences still exist and, in some
instances, have gotten worse. According to a survey by the National Opinion Research Center, 21%
of the 2137 US adults who took the survey claimed to have been mistreated in the medical system,
and 72percent of the total had been mistreated said they had been mistreated multiple times (Nong
et al., 2020). The most common kind of discriminatory practice that people said they had
experienced was based on race. Similarly, the Wellness, Ethnic group, and Pandemic survey,
which used data from a nationwide survey to look at the link between discrimination and stalling
or not getting care during the disaster, found that discrimination was more common among
minority groups like African Americans, Asians, and Hispanics. Generally, 63.7 percent of the
population's answers indicated that they were delayed or did not get any medical services
throughout the pandemic. Approximately 20.3 percent of Asians, 18.6 percent of Blacks, and 15.9
percent of Hispanics said they had been mistreated. Only 2.8 percent of non-Hispanic said they
had been treated this way (Zhang et al., 2022). People who had encountered racial discrimination
were more likely to delay or skip care. These results show that discrimination needs to be dealt
with if there are fewer differences in how health care is given during the disease outbreak and in
the future.
Result of the problem
Based on the reviews of the research detailed, it is inevitable that discrimination in the
medical system hurts individuals, families, and communities by making people less trusting, less
communicative, and less likely to seek medical services. The most significant risk variables for
discriminatory practices or consequences are the parts of a person's identity connected to race, sex,
religion, and ethnicity (Nguyen et al., 2018). It was discovered that the most popular
discriminatory practices were predicated on a person's race, professional training or income level,
sex, religion, or age. However, some of these perceptions of racism could also be encapsulated and
rejected, which implies that findings may understate how common discrimination is in medical
systems (Amstrong et al., 2013). Getting rid of these types of biases in the healthcare system ought
to be a regulation and scheme priority right away.
The implication for social workers
Institutional racism is a social idea that focuses on phenotype. Acknowledging that
marginalization is only sometimes clear-cut or additive, future research should build on what has
already been done to examine how different types of violating the right affect each other and how
they affect regulatory frameworks. Intersectional legislation and developing interventions should
be constructed on and sensitive to these different types of discrimination if they are to be dealt
with effectively. This work should be done in addition to and to help with efforts to fix systemic
inequalities. Stereotyping in healthcare is seen as a big problem that needs policy changes on a
large scale.
Conclusion
This literature review shows that everyone agrees that a promising intervention to deal with
discriminatory healthcare system practices is crucial for the community's well-being, notably when
finding solutions. So, making quality healthcare a standard value enables individuals to get along
better in society by putting a champion remedy to a community issue into action. In order to
reimburse for multilevel interventions to prevent discrimination, individuals need to work with
groups like socially inclusive partnerships, charitable organizations, world health agencies, and
other local public sectors.
References
Nong, P., Raj, M., Creary, M., Kardia, S. L., & Platt, J. E. (2020). Patient-reported experiences of
discrimination in the US health care system. JAMA network open, 3(12), e2029650e2029650.
Zhang, D., Li, G., Shi, L., Martin, E., Chen, Z., Li, J., ... & Han, X. (2022). Association between
racial discrimination and delayed or forgone care amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Preventive Medicine, 162, 107153.
Armstrong, K., Putt, M., Halbert, C. H., Grande, D., Schwartz, J. S., Liao, K., ... & Shea, J. A.
(2013). Prior experiences of racial discrimination and racial differences in health care
system distrust. Medical care, 51(2), 144.
Nguyen, T. T., Vable, A. M., Glymour, M. M., & Nuru-Jeter, A. (2018). Trends for reported
discrimination in health care in a national sample of older adults with chronic conditions.
Journal of general internal medicine, 33(3), 291-297.