In July 2013, a man arrived in the emergency room of a California hospital seeking treatment for his child. But when the intern on call walked in to see him, the father looked at her name tag and demanded another physician. As a Palestinian, he didn’t want his child treated by a Jewish doctor. The intern turned to her resident supervisor, Emily Whitgob, who told her colleagues about the incident.
The episode helped motivate Whitgob to study how doctors in training and their institutions should deal with patients’ prejudice and to publish a report that outlines strategies offered by the professionals she and the other authors consulted. The recommendations, published Wednesday in the Association of American Medical Colleges’ journal Academic Medicine, call for trainees to focus on their role as doctors by not taking hostile comments personally and meeting patients’ anxieties with empathy.
[For more of this story, written by Carmen Heredia Rodriguez, go to http://californiahealthline.or...A&_hsmi=36585116]
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