Why the Healthcare Field Needs More Black Women

Medical technology is improving at a rapid rate, but that doesn’t mean everything is progressing. While around half of all medical students may be women now, the number of Black women specifically is still depressingly low.

Racialized barriers to entry are a discussion worth having, but another issue comes with a simple lack of willingness to hire these women as physicians and healthcare staff once they’ve graduated.

This needs to change, and these five reasons why the healthcare field needs Black women should more than demonstrate why.

Under-representation in Healthcare

It’s a fact that the majority of doctors do not take Black patients seriously. They believe they feel less pain, are more prone to exaggeration, and all manner of other condescending nonsense with no basis in truth.

As a result, mortality rates for virtually all procedures are far greater than their White counterparts. While there’s a number of ways to combat this baked-in racism within the medical field, one of the simplest is to hire more Black people in the medical field, particularly Black women.

As members of these under served and dismissed groups, they know what to look for in patients like themselves, especially when it comes to skin ailments that White doctors simply don’t know how to treat on anything but light skin.

A Growing Field

The healthcare field is continuing to grow, creating an increased demand for professionals within the area. In time, with that growth should ideally be more career opportunities for Black women.

With the demand for medical care always on the rise, there’s simply no reason not to hire Black women at least in proportion to how many are graduating medical school, yet these numbers simply don’t add up in reality.

It shouldn’t have to be said that neglecting to hire people of a certain race like this, either intentionally or through unintentional bias, is not something you should be participating in.

Unique Perspectives

Doctors and surgeons aren’t the only positions that would benefit from an influx of Black women. Research is also a field sorely lacking in non-White perspectives.

When so much of today’s advances seem to be made by and for the benefit of White people to the exclusion of others, having those different perspectives not only helps to eliminate this attitude and provide access to greater numbers of people but also helps make advances in its own right.

Simply put, people of different backgrounds have different ideas, and these different ideas may eventually lead to all sorts of cures for diseases or ideas for medical technology that would never be conceived otherwise.

Better Bedside Manner

Bedside manner is important for any healthcare professional, especially since mentality is a major part of the healing process. For many Black people, a distrust of White doctors is a natural defense mechanism created after years of being dismissed or even abused by them.

Having more Black women on a medical staff can help to change this, reestablishing trust in the medical field and bridging the gap between various groups at the hospital.

It also offers a valuable learning experience for these women’s coworkers that can teach them how to better relate to and earn the trust of their patients.

Better Outcomes

Bad healthcare outcomes cost as much money as they do lives. Unsurprisingly, as we discussed before, many of these bad outcomes affect Black and brown individuals the worst for reasons ranging from racial bias, ignorance, and a lack of funding or quality care at a particular hospital.

By simply having more Black woman on staff, you work to reduce these bad outcomes in frequency and severity thanks to the other reasons detailed here.

That results in a better quality of life for the most vulnerable patients and less cost to the hospital, overall resulting in a better working environment and a better ability to care for people in need.

As the medical field advances, so too should the people who work there. Now, more than ever, the medical field needs Black women.

Black people need to have the experience of having a doctor who looks like them. This could have lots of great outcomes like the ones above that could help Black people have a better future and help to narrow the racial divide in healthcare.