[8-16] Using Health Humanities to Promote Self-awareness of Unconscious Biases and Mitigate Healthcare Inequities
Presentation language：English
Our unconscious biases are more likely to activate if we are in a high intensity situation with competing cognitive demands and/or have to deal with time constraints – which aptly describes clinical care. Health professionals must navigate complicated healthcare systems built for speed, which may trigger unconscious biases.
In the United States, health inequities are persistent and troubling. The 2018 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities report shows black and Hispanic patients received worse care than white patients on several quality measures. While health inequity is a multifactorial problem, evidence indicates unconscious bias among health professionals is a contributing factor.
Drawing from social science literature, this paper describes the evidence supporting unconscious bias among health professionals, as well as the process called de-biasing that helps health professionals and students learn to bring biases to consciousness and mitigate untoward effects on patients. Among de-biasing techniques are two approaches that align with health humanities education: counter-stereotypic training and deliberative processing. The spoken-word poem, Sickle Cell, by Jasmine Bailey is the exemplar that demonstrates how a first-person, artistically-rendered, literary piece by a patient-writer-performer can shake one’s prevailing beliefs and biases about pain, perception, professional roles, communication, and the inadvertent harm we inflict on each other.