As future healthcare
providers, our ethics discussions in class have largely focused on the patient
population we will one day be serving. Recently, we had a discussion regarding
immigration (remember the medical school candidate who made a mean comment
about immigrants on her Facebook?) Although it is important to reflect on this,
what about our future colleagues? Do you really think medical schools are only
filled with US born students? I came across an article this afternoon,
regarding the prevalence of immigrant healthcare workers. According to a research
letter published in JAMA this month pertaining to a census surveying 164,000 US
health professionals, 16.6% are immigrants and 4.6% are
not US citizens. Professions included in the study ranged from dentists to pharmacists
to home health aides to physicians. When it’s broken down, this accounts for nearly
a third of physicians being born outside of the US and a quarter of dentists.
Additionally, 18% of biomedical research run in the US is run by immigrant graduates.
Those are a lot of numbers and percentages but hopefully, the point is clear: our
healthcare system does not only serve a population of immigrants, it is also
run by one. Part of the reason is because these individuals are willing to work
in underserved communities, places where US-born medical school graduates often
rather not serve. Do we often think about the prejudice the other way around? Would
our medical school candidate have made the same comment about a physician? I have
prediction about that, do you?
References:
Patel, Y.
M., Ly, D. P., Hicks, T., & Jena, A. B. (2018). Proportion of Non–US-Born
and Noncitizen Health Care Professionals in the United States in 2016. JAMA,
320(21), 2265–2267. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2018.14270
In a study published last month, researchers focused on the consequences of diversity for the risk of being admitted to the hospital with a serious condition. It is interesting to observe the extent that variations between immigrant and native-born hospitalisation patterns could be accounted for by variations in income, education, and residential area characteristics. With there being so many immigrant health care workers, and as that number grows, the healthcare system is becoming less molded for one particular population. Adjustments for socioeconomic factors tended towards lower hospitalisation rates for most immigrant groups is demonstrated by this study. This is an important factor to examine for future health care providers in understanding prejudice in the healthcare system.
ReplyDeleteFinnvold, Jon Erik. How Social and Geographical Backgrounds Affect Hospital Admission with a Serious Condition: a Comparison of 11 Immigrant Groups with Native-Born Norwegians. BMC Health Services Research, vol. 18, no. 1, 2018, doi:10.1186/s12913-018-3670-0.