Monsurat
The result of two University of Calgary researchers’ survey of Alberta doctors showed biases against indigenous patients and some of the comments left them shocked, the Canadian Press reports.
Conspicuous deaths of indigenous patients in Canada’s health-care system led Pamela Roach and Shannon Ruzycki to reportedly send a survey in September 2020, to every licensed doctor in the province to determine their predispositions.
Speaking to the Canadian press Ruzycki said “ these types of comments demonstrate a fundamental lack of knowledge about what race is, what racism is like, what power is and what privilege is.”
According to the report, one of the respondents – a white doctor – said he felt racism from indigenous people, not the other way around. The doctor wrote “the most common sort of racism I have seen is an indigenous person being racist in words and actions against white people. This is 100 times more common than the converse.”
The researchers said there are cases when people of privilege say they’re experiencing racism, but it comes from a lack of understanding the system of power. Roach and Ruzycki said the power imbalance which already exists between doctor-patient can pose a hazardous atmosphere for indigenous patients seeking medical help.
The report says the survey which had 375 respondents out of about 12,000 that it was sent to, used a ‘feeling thermometer” methodology in two questions that asked partakers to indicate their agreement.
The researchers asked the doctors if they preferred white or indigenous people, to which 25 percent answered that they preferred white people and more than 8 percent answered that they felt unfavorably towards indigenous people.
“The participants self-reported an explicit bias, it should be zero”, Ruzycki told the Canadian Press.
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