I am by training a theoretical scientist, but I spent a good chunk of my career working on problems in public health and healthcare.
Yes, every black person knows this, as do most health professionals, both in public health and medicine - the latter a lot less so, in my opinion and experience.
Here’s why this study matters:
This is the British NHS, not US medicine (I know from other studies that we do much worse). Because the NHS is a cohesive healthcare system (despite what they’ve been voting to do lately over there), they have the duty and the ability as an organization to address it. The article mentions programs they’re undertaking and spending hundreds of millions of pounds on. Hopefully this is going to include things like mandatory training and following the data throughout the year with consequences for facilities that do not bring those numbers in line.
If I was still in active research, I would for sure make use of this report in my own work. One of my major interests is how neurodevelopment and neuroanatomy affect and determine behavior. Those things are directly affected by things like prenatal and postnatal care, physical and emotional stress of the mother, nutrition, and so on. These things in turn affect everything in childhood and adulthood from likelihood to commit violent crimes to likelihood to complete higher education. These problems don’t begin and end at the hospital door, and by using this as one of several pieces of demonstrable and quantitative evidence, we can build off of it to further show the impact and importance of medical disparity. A significant part of my post history is me going into depth on this kind of issue and the implications for things like “criminal justice.”
The same goes for what would be a followup paper on the neurological and then sociological impacts of systemic racism. Unfortunately, those papers are less likely to be used directly to affect policy but can themselves provide the basis for other studies.
We have so fucking far to go it’s daunting, but we wouldn’t have gotten to where we are if we do not keep pushing.
I am by training a theoretical scientist, but I spent a good chunk of my career working on problems in public health and healthcare.
Yes, every black person knows this, as do most health professionals, both in public health and medicine - the latter a lot less so, in my opinion and experience.
Here’s why this study matters:
We have so fucking far to go it’s daunting, but we wouldn’t have gotten to where we are if we do not keep pushing.