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Less Talk More Action: Addressing Unconscious Bias Among Health Professionals
April 3, 2019 @ 8:00 am – 9:00 am
Featured Speaker: Stephen B. Thomas, PhD, Professor, Health Services Administration; Director, Maryland Center for Health Equity; PI, NIH-NIMHD Center of Excellence on Race, Ethnicity & Health Disparities Research, School of Public Health University of Maryland
There is a growing body of evidence demonstrating unconscious bias has infected healthcare professionals.
In his lecture, Stephen B. Thomas, PhD, asserts the medical community must embrace the ultimate aim of uncovering the social, cultural, and environmental factors beyond the medical model affecting communities, so as to address health disparities successfully.
He generates self-reflection on how issues of racial and ethnic discrimination have plagued healthcare by examining the complexities of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. He looks at why the study meant to stop after six months lasted for forty years, and how medical professionals utilized cultural/communal values and beliefs to recruit and retain the cohort of black men.
Thomas then provides a re-enactment of an interaction between a patient and a doctor from his own healthcare system. He moves on to outlining a framework for addressing health disparities, in a way that will “take race, not as a variable to explain away, but as a variable to put front and center.”
Thomas closes his lecture by illustrating two examples of how he and others have applied this framework: free dental care with the Mission of Mercy, and H.A.I.R. – a program to bring healthcare professionals to communities through collaborations with black barbershops.
This lecture was part of Research and Education Week 2019 at Children’s National. You can find a full list of events for that week here.
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