The newly published Anti-Racist Medicine textbook examines how race and ethnicity have influenced clinical care, research and medical education, and how to deliver anti-racist healthcare.
Several years ago, Associate Professor Mehrunisha Suleman, Director of Medical Ethics and Law Education at Oxford Population Health’s Ethox Centre, was chatting to her friend and collaborator, Dr Zeshan Qureshi, a paediatric registrar, about a dilemma that he had read about. Imagine a situation, he told her, in which a parent refuses a doctor’s care for their acutely unwell child because of the doctor’s ethnicity.
Suleman and Qureshi went on to co-author a paper in the BMJ that outlined a nuanced response to this scenario and called for clearer protocols for responding to racism in healthcare settings. The paper ignited fierce debate on social media, and amongst healthcare professionals more generally. It also exposed the need for a resource that medical schools could draw on to provide more training on the delivery of anti-racist healthcare.
‘We wanted to find clear guidance on how this ought to be addressed in the NHS, but sadly such guidelines did not extend beyond zero tolerance policies, which were insufficiently detailed to address high-stakes, complex medical scenarios like, for example, when acutely unwell children are involved,’ recalls Suleman. ‘We then worked with the General Medical Council and the British Medical Association to develop guidelines addressing these specific challenges.’
Read the full story on the Nuffield Department of Population Health website.