Summary
RAND Corporation and MedStar researchers examined the intersection of patient safety and racism, focusing on patient safety and health equity from clinician leaders' perspectives. An overarching emphasis of the work concerned the impact of racism and other related factors (i.e., bias) on patient safety events and potential interventions or changes (such as creating a culture of speaking up about racism in care) that can help prevent such events.
Content
Key findings
- The environmental scan revealed that while patient safety events, overall, were characterised by racial and ethnic disparities, methodological challenges—primarily related to data availability—limited in-depth analysis of this finding.
- The environmental scan also indicated that racism and its impact on patient safety events was more often discussed in editorials than in peer-reviewed and grey literature.
- Subject-matter expert interviews indicated that various levels of racism ranging from internalized and interpersonal to institutional and systemic directly impact the risk of patient safety events and highlighted the interplay between racism and social determinants of health.
- The authors also identified patient, provider, and systems factors that contribute to disparities in patient safety events.
Recommendations
- Health systems should collect patient safety data with equity in mind so that these systems can analyse patient safety events by sociodemographic factors and look for disparities in these events.
- Health systems and patient safety reporting vendors must develop more-efficient and user-friendly formal reporting systems so that healthcare providers are more likely to report patient safety events.
- Healthcare as an industry and medicine as a discipline need to create a culture of speaking up that prevents patient safety events caused by racism from happening.
- Health insurance reform is needed to address some of the underlying drivers of disparities in patient safety events.
Identifying and understanding ways to address the impact of racism on patient safety in health care settings (2022)
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1945-1.html
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