If there is anything good that has come out of this coronavirus pandemic, it is that it brought the health disparities in the Black, brown, and low-income communities to the forefront.
A spotlight is shining on our broken healthcare system. It has shown the absolute distrust so many people of color have for certain aspects of the medical community.
Earlier this year, Genentech released their health equity study examining the patient’s perspective of medically disenfranchised populations.
They looked at over 2,000 patients of which 1,000 were from the general population, 300 were Black, 300 were Hispanic, 300 LGBTQ+, and 300 low socioeconomic status (patients earning under $35,000).
The findings of this study are unsettling. It found there is a crisis of trust in the healthcare system. Some people were surprised, but some were not.
“What this did was allow us to validate for the rest of the public and our population, that this crisis is manifested in that these medically disenfranchised patients don’t believe that the system is setup to support them,” explains Quita Highsmith, Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer, Genentech.
“They actually believe that it’s rigged against them. They don’t believe that all of the patients are treated fairly and equally. The thing that is really concerning is that because they are medically disenfranchised, they may discontinue routine care, may skip appointments, will not participate in clinical trials, and will not get the vaccine [COIVID]. As we think about COVID, knowing we are all going to need to be vaccinated, with this population that doesn’t trust the system, that are not likely to get vaccinated. We have to do more to engage these patients so that they know that the products are going to be safe and effective for them.”
Some of this distrust is rooted in past medical atrocities that are well documented, The Tuskegee Experiment of 1932, Henrietta Lack whose cells were used without her permission, or even as far back as slavery when Dr. Sims, a gynecologist, experimented with slave women.