The newly published Anti-Racist Medicine textbook examines how race and ethnicity have influenced clinical care, research and medical education, and how to deliver anti-racist healthcare.
Several years ago, Associate Professor Mehrunisha Suleman, Director of Medical Ethics and Law Education at Oxford Population Health’s Ethox Centre, was chatting to her friend and collaborator, Dr Zeshan Qureshi, a paediatric registrar, about a dilemma that he had read about. Imagine a situation, he told her, in which a parent refuses a doctor’s care for their acutely unwell child because of the doctor’s ethnicity.
Suleman and Qureshi went on to co-author a paper in the BMJ that outlined a nuanced response to this scenario and called for clearer protocols for responding to racism in healthcare settings. The paper ignited fierce debate on social media, and amongst healthcare professionals more generally. It also exposed the need for a resource that medical schools could draw on to provide more training on the delivery of anti-racist healthcare.
‘We wanted to find clear guidance on how this ought to be addressed in the NHS, but sadly such guidelines did not extend beyond zero tolerance policies, which were insufficiently detailed to address high-stakes, complex medical scenarios like, for example, when acutely unwell children are involved,’ recalls Suleman. ‘We then worked with the General Medical Council and the British Medical Association to develop guidelines addressing these specific challenges.’
This initial project made it clear that whilst much work had been done in the field of anti-racism, there was no comprehensive resource that outlined how anti-racism ought to operate across the full spectrum of health and healthcare. She, Qureshi and Joseph Graves, a professor of biological sciences at North Carolina AT&T State University, began developing a vision for anti-racist medicine that eventually turned into a 44-chapter textbook.
Aimed at healthcare leaders, medical educators, researchers, clinicians, patients, and students, Anti-Racist Medicine: An Essential Guide to Advancing Equity in Medical Education, Research, Technology, Policy, and Practice examines how concepts such as race and ethnicity, which have been shaped by history, continue to influence clinical practice, medical education, research, and healthcare institutions.
The first of its three sections examines and confronts the origins and history of racism in medicine and pseudoscience, and how it has impacted clinical practice and research. The second section focuses on the outcomes of this legacy for health, as well as education within medical schools and in NHS training programmes.
The final section, which Suleman says she is most excited about, delves into the question of how to deliver anti-racist healthcare. It covers issues of leadership, medical education, clinical care, research and technology, and includes core training around active bystander training and cultural humility.
In an event to mark the book’s launch, Suleman, Qureshi and Graves will take part in a panel discussion on Race, Medicine, and Moral Disagreement at the Divinity School in Oxford on 21 April (follow the link to register). They will explore how disagreements emerge in medicine, how they shape medical education, research and practice, and what it means to engage with them openly and responsibly.
‘We hope this textbook will enable everyone to understand what anti-racism actually means in the context of the NHS, so that we can focus on the work of creating equitable healthcare for all,’ says Qureshi.