Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report overlooked ‘30 or 40 years of evidence’ about inequalities

Agnes Agyepong, parent engagement programme manager at Best Beginnings and Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust Maternity Voices Partnership Chair discusses why Black women are not engaging in research and what can be done to change this?

We have published a rapid review that calls for further action on racial bias in pulse oximetry. A series of recommendations for national healthcare, regulatory and research bodies have been outlined: https://t.co/yyOEJnq9Pl https://t.co/TMpGOnh0qH

There is a growing body of evidence, however, that pulse oximetry is less accurate in darker skinned patients. Given the increased mortality amongst ethnic minority patients during the Covid-19 pandemic, it is possible that the differential accuracy of pulse oximetry is a contributing factor to this health inequality

Understanding Patient Data supports conversations with the public, patients and healthcare professionals about the uses of health information for care and research.

What are data and technology? How do they impact Black lives in our health systems?

Some thoughts on the legal and ethical implications of ‘vaccine passports’ (thread)— Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1) March 4, 2021

Under the recommendations from the Race Disparity Unit (RDU) healthcare professionals would be required to ask patients their ethnicity.

John Hollis is one of the rare people who has “super antibodies”. If scientists hope to find others like John, they’ll have to tackle long standing mistrust (& earned!) among the African-American community.

We were often taught to look for symptoms, such as rashes, in a way that I knew wouldn’t appear on my own skin.'

Mobile applications aided by artificial intelligence may help migrants better address their physical and mental health.

In England and Wales, nearly a fifth of people come from a BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) background. The mental health of BAME communities is important because people from these communities often face individual and societal challenges that can affect access to healthcare and overall mental and physical health.

The inequalities for different ethnicities and social classes in accessing health services is well documented, but although a number of recent policy developments have aimed to tackle health inequalities, very little is known about the experiences of Black African migrant communities in accessing health promotion information and services. The aim of the study were to examine the experiences of Black African migrant families in accessing health promotion services.

In the U.K., a recent poll suggested that while Britons were strongly supportive of vaccine passports in principle, agreement broke down when asked whether they should be compulsory for pub visits. For marginalised groups, this feels like nudge theory to overcome a reluctance (based on real trauma) to trust public health services: “some employees who don’t want to get the vaccine feel harassed and ostracized.”

High levels of deprivation and job insecurity, vast income inequality, housing discrimination and medical disparities have long had a severe impact on the tangle of communities and ethnic minority populations that live in these boroughs. But when combined with the necessity to go to work, to take public transport and to share space in densely packed housing, they also provided the perfect breeding ground for a deadly virus. The domino effect would prove catastrophic.

For people of low socio-economic status (SES), a number of factors increase their exposure to COVID-19. Possible causal mechanisms include an increased exposure to the virus, the stress and comorbidities associated with poverty and reduced access to health care. UK policymakers rapidly identified people with multiple comorbidities as particularly vulnerable. However, they must expand their definition of vulnerability to include social factors as risks for COVID-19.

We’re used to medical chatbots giving dangerous advice, but one based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 took it much further. Researchers experimenting with GPT-3, the AI text-generation model, found that it is not ready to replace human respondents in the chatbox. Medical chatbot using OpenAI’s GPT-3 told a fake patient to kill themselves.

“As a queer Black woman living in a white supremacist world, the traumas I endure and the impacts on my health are never-ending.”

Actor David Harewood's BBC documentary explores why people of colour are more likely to die from Covid-19.

How many times have you seen an all-female and black and ethnic minority (BME) panel talking about technology? For many people their first time would have been the Shuri Network launch last July. The Shuri Network was launched in 2019 to support women of colour in NHS digital health develop the skills and confidence to progress into senior leadership positions and help NHS leadership teams more closely represent the diversity of their workforce.

A mixed methods analysis of Black Psychologists’ perspectives and UK mental health Trust data. Presented by Dr Fabienne Palmer BSc (Hons), PGCert, ClinPsyD, CPsychol Monday 26th October 2020 South West EIP Race Equality Project.

At some level, psychiatry (the discipline not just the profession), politicians and policy-makers believe that there is something biologically and culturally determined behind the gross variations in the uptake of the most coercive and socially controlling aspects of mental health provision by Black and Brown people.

Within mental health services, Black people tend to have poorer experiences of mental health services, in terms of access, treatment and outcomes. Institutional racism has been cited as one of the main causes for the differences.

People from ethnic minority backgrounds are less likely to access community mental health services but are over represented in acute and more restrictive settings. Their experience of services mirrors that of staff from ethnic minority groups: it is often more negative than their white counterparts and many of them report that they have never been asked about what impact structural racism has had on their mental health and generally on their lives.

There is much controversy about why some people have poorer life chances, and specifically poorer experiences of health and mental health. One explanation for ethnic inequalities seen in the mental health system, and in society in general, is racism. The place of racism as a cause of mental illness, or factor that leads to poor health, is contested. This is mainly as the evidence is emerging but also as there are strongly held views, both by people who do not want to talk about racism and those that do.

Racism is a systemic issue that pervades every aspect of life in the United States and around the world. In recent months, its corrosive…

Article about the (unpaid) role that Black doctors are playing on Clubhouse in order to combat misinformation about the Covid vaccine. The fact that this platform isn't bothering to even try to address the negative externality of misinformation is a perfect example of a negative impact of data and tech. Black people are already at higher risk of being infected by Covid and of dying from it so the impact of misinformation is disproportionate.