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Showing results for tags 'Unconscious bias'.
Found 71 results
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Content ArticleThis practice pointer in The BMJ explains why diagnostic errors occur and provides five strategies that healthcare workers can use to achieve diagnostic excellence. Each of these strategies is explored in detail: Seek diagnostic feedback, which includes tracking patient outcomes and seeking feedback from patients, families and other healthcare workers. "Byte sized" learning, which involves digital learning activities. Consider bias by getting to know patients and treating them as individuals, and through taking a 'diagnostic pause' to consider whether bias is playing into decisions. Make diagnosis a team sport through multidisciplinary huddles that include healthcare workers from different professions. Foster critical thinking by using intentional strategies to foster reflective scepticism and regular review.
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Content ArticleWomen are 50% more likely to receive a wrong initial diagnosis; when they are having a heart attack, such mistakes can be fatal. People who are initially misdiagnosed have a 70% higher risk of dying. The latest studies have similarly shown that women have worse outcomes for heart operations such as valve replacements and peripheral revascularisation. As well as being misdiagnosed, women are less likely to be treated quickly, less likely to get the best surgical treatment and less likely to be discharged with the optimum set of drugs. None of this is excusable, but is it understandable? What is behind this bias and how can how it be fixed? Sian Harding, emeritus professor of cardiac pharmacology at Imperial College London, looks at the evidence in this Guardian article. Related reading Dangerous exclusions: The risk to patient safety of sex and gender bias Gender bias: A threat to women’s health Medicines, research and female hormones: a dangerous knowledge gap
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Content ArticleThis article by The Decision Lab explains the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which occurs when a person’s lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area causes them to overestimate their own competence. By contrast, this effect also causes those who excel in a given area to think the task is simple for everyone, and underestimate their relative abilities as well. The article covers the following topics: Where this bias occurs Individual effects Systemic effects Why it happens Why it is important How to avoid it How it all started It also includes two real-world examples of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
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Content ArticleRAND 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.
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Content ArticleThis practical guide was commissioned by The Health Foundation and NHS England to support NHS systems to tackle health inequalities. Co-written by the Yorkshire and Humber Academic Health Science Network and a reference group of national experts, stakeholders, service providers and people with lived experience of inequalities, the guide suggests practical action that systems can take to ensure equitable access, excellent experience and optimal outcomes for all. The guide covers four key areas for action and features good practice examples which systems and providers can adapt and apply to their local context. There are also checklists to assist system leaders, managers, clinicians, and operational staff, to design new models of care and embed sustainable action to drive down healthcare inequalities. The guide supports the national Core20plus5 approach to reduce healthcare inequalities which focuses on a population group of the core 20% most deprived nationally and those from inclusion health groups; outlining five clinical areas of focus.
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Content ArticleCognition is the mental process of knowing, including awareness, perception, reasoning and judgement, and is distinct from emotion and volition. Cognitive processes include mental shortcuts, which speed up decision making. However, cognitive bias occurs when the shortcut causes inferences about other people and/or situations to be drawn in an illogical fashion. There is a tendency to display bias in judgements that are made in everyday life, indeed this is a natural element of the human psyche. Jumping to a conclusion, tunnel vision, only seeing what is expected/wanted, being influenced by the views of others, all are recognisable behaviours. However, whilst such biases may be commonplace and part of human nature, it is essential to guard against these in forensic science, where many processes require subjective evaluations and interpretations. The consequences of cognitive bias may be far-reaching; investigators may be influenced to follow a particular line of enquiry or interpretation of a finding that may be incomplete, or even wrong. Simply because there is a risk of a cognitive bias does not imply that it occurs. The problem is that as it is a subconscious bias it is unlikely that an individual will know either way and therefore it is wise that all practitioners understand the issue and take proportionate steps to mitigate against it.
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Content ArticleIn this blog, Gurpreet Kaur, who had to use a wheelchair for five years due to the severity of her endometriosis, talks about her firsthand experience of gender bias in pain management. She recalls sexist and inappropriate comments made to her by male healthcare professionals, describing how they belittled her pain and treated her as a 'hysterical woman'. She also highlights that research clearly demonstrates that women of color are more disproportionately affected by dismissals of their pain.
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Content ArticleThis is the transcript of a Westminster Hall debate in the House of Commons on Black Maternal Health Awareness Week 2022, dedicated to raising awareness about disparities in maternal outcomes.
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EventJoin clinical experts, thought leaders, and advocates for a collaborative discussion on the issues of health disparities, structural racism, and medicine as they examine specific dermatologic diseases in a series of four free and open educational webinars from the Harvard Medical School. Structural racism and racial bias in medicine: Wednesday, October 28, 1:00-2:15 PM ET Hair disorders in people of colour: Thursday, November 12, 1:00-2:15 PM ET Pigmentary disorders and keloids: Wednesday, November 18, 1:00-2:15 PM ET COVID-19 Comorbidities and cutaneous manifestations of systemic diseases in adults and children: Wednesday, December 2, 1:00-2:15 PM ET Implicit bias and structural racism play a central role in the development of healthcare disparities. One of the critically important areas in medicine is the misdiagnosis of disease in people with darker skin types due to implicit bias and the lack of awareness among physicians in recogniszing the disease pattern. Clinicians in primary care, emergency medicine, hospital medicine, surgery, pediatrics, and other medical specialties can deliver improved care if they can recognize and diagnose medical conditions based on skin findings in patients of color. This four-part series aims to improve diagnosis in people of color, describe pathogenesis and treatment of diseases, develop cultural competency, and impact change in health care policy so more is done to reduce racial bias in medical practice and medical research. Providing this education, in turn, will ultimately help reduce health disparities and improve the lives of underrepresented minority populations. Register for one event or all four.
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Content Article
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Pain is spoken about often within health and social care. Patients might be asked to locate our pain during examinations, to rate our level of pain or to describe the type of pain we are feeling. They may be forewarned of the possibilities of pain occurring during or after procedures or operations. Medical consent forms often include reference to the risk of pain and require a signature to confirm they have been appropriately ‘informed’. Pain can be acute (lasting less than 12 weeks) or chronic (lasting more than 12 weeks), and the way we experience it, our thresholds, can also vary. It can be our body’s way of warning us of potential damage, yet it can also occur when no actual harm is happening to the body.[1] It can cause trauma, physiological reactions, mental health difficulties and chronic fatigue, and can have a huge impact on someone’s quality of life and ability to perform daily tasks.[2] Pain is undoubtedly complex, but is it a patient safety issue?[3] -
Content ArticleDisparities in healthcare exist because of socioeconomic factors, structural racism and implicit bias. The panelists in this video identify the problems and discuss what solutions are in place that could improve health disparities such as medical education, more training for underrepresented minority physicians, more funding for research, and fast-tracking publication of research. Furthermore, the panelists explore how the field of dermatology and other medical specialties can address these issues.
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Content ArticleBy understanding how physicians make clinical decisions, and examining how errors due to cognitive biases occur, cognitive bias awareness training and debiasing strategies may be developed to decrease diagnostic errors and patient harm. Studies of the impact of teaching critical thinking skills have mixed results but are limited by methodological problems. The authors of this paper, published in Academic Medicine, argue that explicit instruction in metacognition in medical education, including awareness of cognitive biases, has the potential to reduce diagnostic errors and thus improve patient safety.
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Content Article
The Yentl syndrome is alive and well (March 2011)
PatientSafetyLearning Team posted an article in Women's health
More women than men die annually from ischaemic heart disease (IHD) in the developed world. This represents a reversal of fortune from previous decades and places women firmly as the new majority now impacted. Notably, the adverse IHD gender gap is the widest in relatively young women, where myocardial infarction (MI) mortality is 2-fold higher in women under 50 years compared with age-matched men. While it is now clear that there are many gender differences in IHD outcomes, including more frequent angina diagnosis, more office visits, more avoidable hospitalisations, higher MI mortality, and higher rates of heart failure in women compared with men, the aetiologies contributing to these differences are less clear. -
Content ArticleFor 10 years, 29-year-old historian Robyn battled extreme endometriosis pain, but was continuously dismissed by doctors when she went to them for help. She was finally diagnosed with the condition – but five surgeries later, it was clear the damage had already been done. In this article published by Stylist, she asks why women’s health issues aren’t being taken seriously enough.
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In this guest blog, Sarah Graham, award winning journalist, founder of Hysterical Women and author of Rebel Bodies, talks about gender bias within healthcare. Sarah draws on research, anecdotal evidence and the recent Cumberlege report to highlight how widespread mistreatment of women can have a negative impact on their safety as a patient. -
Content ArticleRacial discrimination still exists in NHS organisations but can be eradicated if the attitudes and processes used to improve patient safety are adopted, says Roger Kline.
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Content ArticleThe aim of the study, published in the Journal of Patient Safety, was to determine whether race differences exist in voluntarily reported harmful patient safety events in a large 10 hospital healthcare system on a high reliability organisation journey. Findings showed that race differences in harmful events exist in voluntary reporting systems by type and by hospital setting. Healthcare organisations, particularly healthcare high reliability organisations, can use these findings to help identify areas of further study and investigation. Further study and investigation should include efforts to understand the root cause of the differences found in this study, including the role of reporting bias.
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Content ArticleEvidence to date indicates that patients from ethnic minority backgrounds may experience disparity in the quality and safety of health care they receive due to a range of socio-cultural factors. Although heightened risk of patient safety events is of key concern, there is a dearth of evidence regarding the nature and rate of patient safety events occurring amongst ethnic minority consumers, which is critical for the development of relevant intervention approaches to enhance the safety of their care.The findings of this systematic review, published in the International Journal for Equity in Health, provide substantial evidence to suggest that people from ethnic minorities are vulnerable to a higher rate of patient safety events in the hospital and community setting compared to the mainstream population.
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Content Article
The MBRRACE-UK Saving Lives, Improving Mothers' Care report found that black women in the UK are five times as likely as white women to die during pregnancy or childbirth. -
Content ArticleMore than 1 in 10 women will experience postnatal depression within the first year after giving birth. With a recent study showing that postnatal depression is 13% higher among black and ethnic minority women than it is among white women, it raises significant questions around whether these women are receiving the right treatment and support.
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Today, Patient Safety Learning stands with others around the world to celebrate International Women’s Day 2021. In light of this year’s campaign theme “choose to challenge” we are raising awareness of some of the ways in which male bias can negatively impact on patient safety. Drawing on case studies and quantitative research, this blog focuses on three key areas: Design – using examples to illustrate how male-centric design of equipment and medical devices affects patient safety. Data – discussing how data which does not account for differences between the sexes impacts on patient safety. Dismissal – considering the recurring theme from personal testimonials, and healthcare scandals in recent years, that women’s voices and patient safety concerns are being ignored or dismissed. We will reflect on the key patient safety issues and inequalities in each of these areas and offer our perspective on what needs to happen moving forward to prevent future avoidable harm.
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