Dricrimination of Women in the Family And In The Healthcare System Essay

Women have been discriminated against for a long time and it still happens today. Women are being discriminated against in institutions like family and healthcare. Women are viewed as less than men and are not taken seriously. Examples of this are mentioned in “Family and Women’s Lives” by Susan Lehrer and “A Marriage Agreement” by Alix Kates Shulman. When talking about family people tend to have the image of a nuclear family in their head; two heterosexual parents with two kids. In this family the mother takes on the responsibility of the house, the children and her own job while the father works.Dricrimination of Women in the Family And In The Healthcare System Essay

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An example discrimination on women in a family institution is the assumption that woman are the ones who have to leave her job if she gets pregnant to take care of the child. Men say their wife’s education is important and meaningful as long as dinner is on the table when they get home (Lehrer, 251). Also when money is short the women would be the one to go without a meal to make sure their children and husband have something to eat (Lehrer, 252). There is a lot of this in Hispanic families in my opinion. I’m Puerto Rican and growing up at family dinners the women were always the one doing the kitchen work. These were their roles. Women give up so much and take on so many responsibilities but society still looks at women as less than and weak. If you look at women without judgment you can see how strong they are for giving up who they are to take care of others. Lehrer ends her article saying that the challenge we have today as a society is to accept change when women decided not to take on the gender norms in the household and to help shape the change to make women’s live easier than harder (Lehrer, 255)Dricrimination of Women in the Family And In The Healthcare System Essay

It is often challenging to have health care services that meet the needs of Canada’s diverse population and the needs of both men and women. Gender influences access to care and women in particular are at risk for face difficulties to care (Ontario Women`s Health Equity Report, 2010 p.1). Women are more likely to be poor and have greater caregiver responsibilities in contrast to men. These both factors are barriers to accessing health services. The way the health care system is organized creates barriers to accessing effective care for women because it has failed to take into account that men and women use the health care system very differently.Dricrimination of Women in the Family And In The Healthcare System Essay

A patient of mine recently shared a story with me about her visit to an area emergency room a few years ago.* She had a painful medical condition. The emergency room staff not only did not treat her pain, but she recounted: “They treated me like I was trying to play them, like I was just trying to get pain meds out of them. They didn’t try to make any diagnosis or help me at all. They couldn’t get rid of me fast enough.”Dricrimination of Women in the Family And In The Healthcare System Essay

There was nothing in her history to suggest that she was pain medication seeking. She is a middle-aged, churchgoing lady who has never had issues with substance abuse. Eventually, she received a diagnosis and appropriate care somewhere else. She is convinced that she was treated poorly by that emergency room because she is black.

And she was probably right. It is well-established that blacks and other minority groups in the U.S. experience more illness, worse outcomes, and premature death compared with whites.1,2 These health disparities were first “officially” noted back in the 1980s, and though a concerted effort by government agencies resulted in some improvement, the most recent report shows ongoing differences by race and ethnicity for all measures.1,2 Dricrimination of Women in the Family And In The Healthcare System Essay

Why are certain groups of patients getting different care?
Doctors take an oath to treat all patients equally, and yet not all patients are treated equally well. The answer to why is complicated.

Cases like my patient’s above illustrate the negative assumptions and associations we can label racism, but “most physicians are not explicitly racist and are committed to treating all patients equally. However, they operate in an inherently racist system.”3 In addition, we know that our own subconscious prejudices, also called implicit bias, can affect the way we treat patients.4 Basically, there are so many layers and levels to this issue, it’s hard to wrap our heads around it. But, we’ll try.Dricrimination of Women in the Family And In The Healthcare System Essay

We now recognize that racism and discrimination are deeply ingrained in the social, political, and economic structures of our society.3,4 For minorities, these differences result in unequal access to quality education, healthy food, livable wages, and affordable housing. In the wake of multiple highly publicized events, the Black Lives Matter movement has gained momentum, and with it have come more strident calls to address this ingrained, or structural, racism, as well as implicit bias.

Then, there was the 2016 presidential election. Explicitly expressed racism and religious intolerance has become commonplace. Last week, an older Muslim patient of mine* related that lately she has been harassed by strangers for wearing a headscarf. “I don’t feel safe even walking around my neighborhood,” she wept. “I used to love walking in the mornings or after work … it’s been months since I felt I could do that.”Dricrimination of Women in the Family And In The Healthcare System Essay

In response to the rhetoric of the election and this alarming increase in hate speech, a large group of physicians published an open letter seeking to reassure patients. The letter is a statement of commitment to health as a human right, women’s health, mental health, LGBTQ health, evidence-based medicine, dismantling structural racism, and ending race-based violence.5 It’s everything I want to tell my patients right now.Dricrimination of Women in the Family And In The Healthcare System Essay

Why are doctors sometimes the targets of bias and racism?
A colleague of mine, Dr. Altaf Saadi, recently wrote about her experiences treating patients at our own hospital. She has been questioned, insulted, and even attacked by patients, because she is a Muslim woman who wears a headscarf.5 She is not alone. Recent published reports include overt bigotry expressed towards doctors of black, Indian and Jewish heritage.6,7,8 Several medical journals have just published guidelines for doctors with titles like “Dealing with Racist Patients” and “The Discriminatory Patient and Family: Strategies to Address Discrimination Towards Trainees.”9,10 It’s sad that we need these guides.Dricrimination of Women in the Family And In The Healthcare System Essay

And can we fix this?
Articles addressing racism in medicine suggest many of the same things. To fight racism and discrimination, we all need to recognize, name, and understand these attitudes and actions. We need to be open to identifying and controlling our own implicit biases. We need to be able to manage overt bigotry safely, learn from it, and educate others. These themes need to be a part of medical education, as well as institutional policy. We need to practice and model tolerance, respect, open-mindedness, and peace for each other.Dricrimination of Women in the Family And In The Healthcare System Essay

It is important to link all of these goals and actions together, as they are layers of the same huge problem. The insidious structural racism, subconscious implicit bias, and overt, external discrimination come from the same place. Dr. Saadi’s words hold very true:

“We — as physicians and society more generally — must realize that the struggles of one marginalized community are struggles of all of us. My fight as a Muslim-American doctor to serve my patients without fear of racism, and the fight of an African-American patient to be treated with dignity and respect, should also be your fights.”Dricrimination of Women in the Family And In The Healthcare System Essay

Health inequity, categories and examples of which were discussed in the previous chapter, arises from social, economic, environmental, and structural disparities that contribute to intergroup differences in health outcomes both within and between societies. The report identifies two main clusters of root causes of health inequity. The first is the intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, and systemic mechanisms that organize the distribution of power and resources differentially across lines of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, gender expression, and other dimensions of individual and group identity (see the following section on such structural inequities for examples). The second, and more fundamental root cause of health inequity, is the unequal allocation of power and resources—including goods, services, and societal attention—which manifest in unequal social, economic, and environmental conditions, also called the social determinants of health. Box 3-1 includes the definitions of structural inequities and the social determinants of health.Dricrimination of Women in the Family And In The Healthcare System Essay

The factors that make up the root causes of health inequity are diverse, complex, evolving, and interdependent in nature. It is important to understand the underlying causes and conditions of health inequities to inform equally complex and effective interventions to promote health equity.