Black women’s groups fight bias in health care
Monday, August 19, 2024
A bill headed to the State Senate floor this week would require California to start tracking discrimination in health care.
Assembly Bill 3161 asks the state Department of Public Health to collect self-reported patient demographics from complaints at hospitals and long-term care facilities.
Shaleta Smith, a patient from Corona, said she feels bias played a role in her treatment when she faced a life-threatening hemorrhage after childbirth at an Orange County hospital in 2007.
“The emergency room doctor basically told the nurse, ‘We need her out of here. I want to discharge her.’ She looked at me and she said, ‘I’m scared for you.’ And I said ‘I’m scared for myself,'” Smith recounted. “Luckily, I was able to stay. And if I would have gone home, I would have bled to death. I wouldn’t be here today.”
The bill would also require hospital patient safety plans to specify methods to address racism and discrimination in health care, including procedures for staff to anonymously report instances of racial bias.
Raena Granberry, director of maternal and reproductive health for the California Black Women’s Health Project, said she has heard of cases where patients felt staff ignored them or discounted their level of pain.
“Hearing a father come in and say, ‘We’ve asked the doctors for seven hours to intervene,’ and she laid there for seven hours and bled to death,” Granberry recalled. “It is a pain that ripples through the community. It’s crippling to our collective well-being to continue to experience these types of things.”
Hospitals maintain they offer the same high level of care for all patients, regardless of race.
Onyemma Obiekea, policy director for the Black Women for Wellness Action Project, said the data, when broken down by race, will tell a different story.
“It’s really important as well for patient safety plans to actually consider the role that some of our biases play in the quality of care that patients receive,” Obiekea urged. “Particularly when they are people of color.”
This article was originally published by Public News Service.