Ways to Decrease Barriers in Healthcare for Minoritized Populations?

There are numerous barriers of healthcare. One of the ways to assist with this is to enhance professional curriculum and further research related to targeted populations. Minorities are disproportionally affected by health care inequities and have poorer health outcomes than non-minorities (Thomas et al,2020). Biases contribute greatly to discrimination and perpetuate the disparities and inequities of care.

Education and curriculum development aimed at reducing implicit biases and highlighting the importance of the patient-provider interaction, can enhance trust in the healthcare environment. Assisting students to become mindful of their own beliefs and implicit bias towards diverse populations will enhance healthcare delivery and outcomes can facilitate collaborative learning environments. This necessitates having developed inclusive and comprehensive curricula needed to promote critical thinking and awareness, which would include ethnic, cultural, racial, and sexual/gender minorities. A comprehensive curriculum within professional education and training and would facilitate the development of cultural humility and social inequities.

Training programs that include skill development, perspective taking, and empathy training may help equip providers with sensitivity and skills to repair any difficulties with their patients in lieu of implicit racial bias (Gonzalez et al., 2018). In addition to training, research is needed on the intersectionality of race/ethnicity, sociocultural, and sexual and gender minorities among healthcare providers and patient populations and the impact that such interactions can have on health outcomes. Non-binary, genderqueer, or gender diverse, bisexual identities and racial diversity are factors that additionally are under-represented in the literature and must be considered in empirical data gathered on provider and patient interactions.