Reflections on Training of Medical Professionals, Structural Bias, Racism, Hierarchy, and Power Dynamics in Healthcare

Health care professionals face challenges with socialization, authority, interprofessional interactions, communication, training, and professional identities. Factors that influence healthcare culture include systemic racism, bias, social structuring of activities and practice, interactional character of care, social boundaries, organizational and professional cultures, power dynamics of care delivery, regulatory, political, and institutional contexts of care, multiple interacting (human and non-human) actors (Tweedy, 2015; Waring et al., 2016). These cultural factors can and do cause harm to patients and healthcare workers. Uncovering ways in which harm is done will enable us to break barriers and develop a systems approach that treat people with equity.

Training Medical Professionals

A book by Damon Tweedy, Black Men in White Coats, explores race, bias, and the unique health problems of Black Americans (Tweedy, 2015). Tweedy points out that in a 2006 book, The Price of Admission, author Daniel Golden says elite schools are widely known to give preference to children of alumni and faculty (Tweedy, 2015). The beneficiaries of these policies are overwhelmingly white which highlights the pre-civil rights era segregation (Tweedy, 2015). This benefit becomes a generational advantage to these families while disadvantaging people from non-majority or disadvantaged backgrounds. The strain of…