Racist Incidents Common In Doctor Settings, Montco-Based Patient Safety Company Reports

PLYMOUTH MEETING, PA — A Montgomery County-based national patient safety advocacy organization has released a report that analyzes incidents of a racist nature that have occurred throughout various healthcare settings, the findings showing that both doctors and patients are nearly equally responsible for making inappropriate remarks about race to one another.

ECRI, which is headquartered in Plymouth Meeting, says it reviewed more than 500 patient safety incidents relating to race, which found that 57 percent of incidents involved patients making inappropriate racial comments to staff or engaging in racist behavior, while 42 percent of cases involved incidents initiated by healthcare workers against patients.

Company experts warn that experiencing repeated race-related safety incidents can hamper morale and harm providers' mental health, in turn causing some to leave the healthcare profession, which would have a detrimental effect on hospitals and healthcare systems already under strain due to major staffing shortages.

"As health systems implement diversity, equity, and inclusion plans, the needs of providers of color must be taken into account, as well as those of patients," Marcus Schabacker, president and CEO of ECRI, said in a statement. "Creating an equitable and safe environment requires recognizing when racist incidents occur and taking action in response."

ECRI says it teamed up with the Institute for Safe Medication Practices PSO to look at a full year's worth of events relating to racial or ethnic minority groups and sorting the incidents into various categories, such as staff making inappropriate comments to patients, patients and family members making inappropriate remarks to healthcare workers, patients requesting for provider or staff member based on race or ethnicity and interpretation or translation services not provided.

"This analysis provides a snapshot into the experiences of racial and ethnic minority groups at every level of care delivery," Dheerendra Kommala, chief medical officer at ECRI, said in a statement. "More needs to be done. ECRI is working with healthcare institutions to set up organizational procedures to identify, report and resolve these issues."

The full report is titled ECRI's Deep Dive: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health and Healthcare.

The report says that "study after study" has shown that racial and ethnic minority groups in the United States are more likely to experience disparities in care than their white counterparts, which includes an increased risk of being ininsured or underinsured, a lack of access to care and unsatisfactory health outcomes for treatable and preventable diseases.

"Recognizing, detecting, and addressing such disparities is an essential component of patient safety," the report states.

Anyone interested in learning more about the analysis can check out ECRI's full report here.