Implicit Bias (Exam 2)

How can I fight biases and stereotyping?

-point it out -be an example -speak up

In an effort to reduce health care disparities, health care professionals must be aware of these implicit biases, as they may directly affect the care provided to specific vulnerable populations:

Minority ethnic populations, Immigrants, The poor, Low health-literacy individuals, Sexual minorities, Children, Women, The elderly, The mentally ill, The overweight, The disabled

Examine Your Own Biases

One of the important steps in combating such trends is our willingness to examine our own possible biases. Have you ever made an assumption about a patient based on his/her appearance or other basic traits? As humans, our ability to distinguish friends from foe helped us survive, thus we quickly and automatically categorize people based on social or other demographic characteristics. However, we also know this is the foundation of stereotypes, prejudice and ultimately, discrimination.

A study published in 2015 revealed heterosexual health care professionals had:

a moderate to strong preference for treating heterosexual people over gay and lesbian patients.

The Institute of Medicine concluded that unrecognized or unknown biases of members of a certain social demographic may affect:

communication and the care offered to those individuals.

Specifically, for the LGBTQ+ patient population, there is an overwhelming body of evidence that:

discriminatory treatment exists to those seeking medical care. In recent years, the notion that implicit bias may play a role in these discriminatory trends has been explored in greater detail.

In recent years, the theory that implicit bias in health care may directly lead to:

health care disparities has been well documented in the literature and has received national attention, including highlights in Healthy People 2000 and Healthy People 2010.

The National Institute of Health has prioritized eliminating health care disparities in its top five initiatives and has encouraged:

health care practitioners to consider how biases, stereotypes and discrimination may contribute to such disparities.

Explicit bias requires that a person is aware of:

his/her evaluation of a group and believes that evaluation is accurate.

As mentioned above, examining one's own biases is the first step of combating:

the biases within our society and within health care. Putting the bias out in the open is the first step in eliminating it. Hiding it does not solve any problems.

Bias is defined as ____.

the negative evaluation of one group and its members relative to another.

In contrast, implicit (unconscious) bias does not require an individual to be aware of:

their evaluations of a certain group and operates in an unintentional and unconscious form.

You may know all of the biases to avoid, but unless we start facing unconscious biases,:

we will never be able to honestly tackle the bias within ourselves.

Strategies to better care for patients of diverse backgrounds:

•Focus on individual attributes of each patient, rather than seeing the patient through a lens of group membership •Enhance communication by interacting and discussing with colleagues and patients with diverse experiences •Increase perspective taking and empathy

A major project on the IATs resulted in several key findings:

•Implicit bias is pervasive •People are often unaware of their implicit bias •Implicit bias predicts behavior •People differ in levels of implicit bias

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

•There are many tools you can use to examine your own possible biases. One tool is the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that measures attitudes and beliefs that people may be unwilling or unable to report. •The IAT measures relationships between different concepts (e.g., gender, ethnicity) and your subconscious assessment (e.g., good/bad). •Many different IAT are available, including those for gender, ethnicity, sexuality and more. Although the IAT is subject to controversy due to the lack of reproducibility and the question of what it measures, it gives a glimpse to what we may be closing our eyes to.