Addressing Racism as a Health Issue in Family Medicine Residency Education

What is it about?

This article highlights an ongoing program that espouses the importance of addressing racism as a health issue and will reveal individual experiences and challenges in addressing it within urban underserved residency program settings. Collaborators on this project are two underrepresented minority residency program faculty, a resident who is passionate about social justice and who is ethnically different from the majority of his patients, and lastly an international resident of color who has experienced racism directly and indirectly during residency training.

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Why is it important?

The United States is currently experiencing an exacerbation of racial tensions and health-care providers working in urban underserved areas deal with the effects of racism on patients on a daily basis. To effectively address patients’ needs, it is imperative that physicians and behavioral health providers acknowledge the racial and socioeconomic challenges that patients face and recognize how these factors transcend to the physical and psychological medical conditions that patients experience. Due to the ethnic disparities in the health care provider workforce, the majority of providers are often of different ethnic, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds from the patients they serve. Any effort to teach providers how to provide cross-cultural care is needed and imperative for treating patients of color.

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