BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, UNITED STATES, December 7, 2022
Foundation Focuses on Anti-Racism and Power Building to Transform Healthcare
Speaking at a virtual forum hosted Tuesday by the Universal Healthcare Foundation, Dr. Bram Wispelwey, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith and Universal’s President Frances G. Padilla cited the importance of implementing race-conscious interventions to address structural racism in healthcare.
”We anticipate that in the next decade our work will really be…embedded in that journey to build grassroots power for equity and justice in healthcare,” said Padilla, who moderated the panel. “And we know that racism is the through line. So, what I want to start with is asking why race-conscious approaches are needed to address structural racism in healthcare.”
Dr. Wispelwey, an Associate Physician in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and an Instructor at Harvard Medical School, said there aren’t effective alternatives to race-conscious interventions. He noted that Dr. Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says the only alternatives are to be race blind or misuse race ignoring “the historical, social and political construct.”
‘What we noticed is that patients of color were more likely to go to general medicine…Two-thirds of White patients went to the cardiology service, but only half of Black and Latinx patients.”