Doctors Have Little Guidance On What To Do With Racist Patients

It was Dr. Emily Whitgob’s first year in a supervising role at Stanford Hospital when she first encountered discrimination from a patient.
The father of a pediatric patient took one look at her intern’s name tag and asked if the last name was Jewish. 
“I don’t want a Jewish doctor,” the man said. “I’m from Palestine.”
The intern explained that she had taken her husband’s last name, and that she herself was not Jewish. The father accepted this explanation, but as the intern finished treating his child and was about to pass the family off to a more specialized doctor for a surgical consultation, the father had a second request.
“The consultant who’s coming down to take care of my child — is that doctor going to be Jewish?” he asked. “I really don’t want a Jewish doctor.”
When the intern later relayed this encounter to Whitgob, it led to an important question: How should doctors and their supervisors handle discriminatory requests? 
Shocked by her resident’s experience and the lack of guidance provided by hospitals and medical schools, Whitgob decided to create new guidelines on how to handle discrimination from patients, now published in the journal Academic Medicine.
Whitgob’s guidelines fold into a larger industry-wide effort to improve young doctors’ experiences. Medical schools and hospitals have begun speaking openly about the intense pressure st...

Source: Science - The Huffington Post - October 26, 2016 Category: Science Source Type: news