Changing Disparities in Health Care
Action
It is an irrefutable fact that there are extensive disparities perpetuated by providers and systems within the medical community. To bring increased awareness to this issue, we (Avery Underwood and Mia Bylykbashi) created a document discussing these inequities. In a compilation of statistics on disparities, explanation for how they came to be, and suggestions for alleviating them, we analyzed patient care differences in health facilities, placing it in context of the Burlington area. The document we created has been linked below:
The document was sent to Cone Health Hospital, Elon University’s Health Services, the Kernodle Center family practice, AMM healthcare, and a private provider with the following message:
Hi there!
This is Mia Bylykbashi and Avery Underwood. We’re undergraduate students at Elon University on the physician assistant track. For one of our classes, we’ve compiled a document describing health care disparities (their causes, outcomes, and possible solutions to fixing them). We’ve forwarded this along to you in hopes that you’ll read it and it may give you further insight into the systemic issue of racism, sexism, and other social issues within healthcare, as well as some ideas for practices you can implement into your patient care to make healthcare more equitable. If you wouldn’t mind sharing your thoughts and ideas, it would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you so much for your time,
-Mia and Avery
Analysis
After the distribution of our Changing Healthcare Disparities document, we received no responses after the first week. We believe this to be highly telling of the state of healthcare right now. Workers are highly overwhelmed, and too busy/stressed to be bothered with changing and remodeling the systems in which they participate. Though this action may not have been particularly effective, we find it to be very informative. We know now that in order for change to be effected, it is not enough to simply contact these healthcare providers and facilities. There must be top-down ordinances from our legal systems like laws and regulations that force medical systems to address disparities. This way, providers will have no choice but to ensure their actions are equitable. We have learned much from the creation of this document, including the treacherous extent of the disparities within healthcare. The project was effective in furthering our education and understanding of societal injustices, however, the barriers in place in healthcare prevented us from taking more effective action. Both of us plan to advance into the healthcare field , and it is important that these disparities remain in the forefront of our thoughts when we begin seeing patients.
Positionality
Our identity of PA students definitely played a role in our actions — knowing we may rely on these providers to attain shadowing experiences in our future makes being blunt about the system much harder. Furthermore, both of us are young, white, educated, and financially stable enough to attend a University. We share privilege in this sense because we can discuss these issues without extensive fear of retribution or inability to find or access healthcare. As women, we’ve experienced instances where we’ve felt unheard by our providers, which is a slim margin of what so many low income, transgender, LGBTQIA+, and/or people of color experience as well. Knowing that our couple of experiences with discrimination in healthcare are felt tenfold every day by individuals of marginalized identities made this project feel even more impactful.
Reflection
When compiling the document that we sent out to these practices, we had to do intensive research into different studies that have been done. From doing this, it was eye opening to learn of all the different factors that play into part when it comes to healthcare. From income, to access, to race, so many identities contribute to the care that is provided to an individual.
As future healthcare providers, this identifies to us how we can be better and how we can work to eradicate these issues in our future work.
After getting no responses, it meant to us many things. There is the big possibility that the email was not seen by the practice. It is also possible that the practice is unable to respond due to their schedules currently. As stated above, it also shows us that healthcare practices are incredibly overworked and busy that they do not have time to try and implement these ideas.
To us, it shows the difficulty of working in a healthcare facility and the limit of power we have. Not receiving answers is also disheartening to us because it makes us wonder if our ideas were ever read or considered.
Now that we have finished the project and have received no answers, we realize that it is possible that emailing is not sufficient when it comes to these topics. If we were to do the project differently, we might have actually gone to these practices to present our ideas. By presenting our ideas to them, they would be more inclined to listen and take in the information.
The only way to get points and information across to healthcare facilities is through set aside time that the providers and clinicians are able to attend. With that, having a time to present information might be better received and more likely to be implemented.
