1) How do individual physicians contribute to health care disparities? Thinking about an area of health care of particular interest to you, what research do you think could be done to either understand the effect of individual physicians on health disparities, or to decrease this effect?
Individual physicians may contribute to health care disparities knowingly or unknowingly. Language barriers, limited ability to understand different cultures may limit the health care experience and interaction between provider and patient. On the other hand, personal and implicit bias may perpetuate health care disparities.
2) Structural issues within health care delivery are implicated in health care disparities. Please brainstorm 4 structural issues that might contribute to these disparities. Which of these are relevant to your particular area of research, and how?
In developing countries, low-income and less educated patients are offered poor quality health care services. Before starting research work in US, I have worked in India. We looked at the cancer care among two economically different regions. The quality of care varied at each level of cancer treatment – detection and diagnosis, transport, medical drugs, treatment and chemotherapy. Other evident issue was prominent gender difference. It was more so of a structural issue due to lack of universal insurance coverage and male -dominating society, where families would do more efforts to save the male member.
One another structural issues could be how doctors are trained as mentioned in one of the readings that examples of diseases in textbook make us built racial bias.