A study carried out by an emergency doctor from Montpellier (south-east) and published this week in the international journal European Journal of Emergency Medicineshows the importance of prejudices in the diagnosis of caregivers.
1 min
Whether you are a woman or a man, black or white, you are not always treated the same way in a hospital emergency room. These are the conclusions of a vast study carried out among 1,500 professionals from 159 cities in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Monaco.
As at the reception of an emergency department, the caregivers interviewed had to sort the files of fictitious patients according to the severity of their symptoms. All suffered from fairly standard chest pain. The medical files were accompanied by the photo of eight patient profiles, generated by artificial intelligence: four men and four women in their fifties, their hands on their chests, dressed in the same way, but of supposedly different origins – Asian, European, North African and sub-Saharan countries.
As a result, the case is considered less serious when it is a woman rather than a man. The same goes when the person is black. Thus, a black woman only has a 40% chance of being classified as a life-threatening emergency, and therefore of being treated as a priority, compared to 60% for a white man.
Doctor Xavier Bobbia, at the origin of this study, considers these conclusions intolerable. And specifies that caregivers have the same prejudices as caregivers; it does not depend on the gender of the healthcare professional. The emergency physician nevertheless puts forward solutions: the creation of a standardized triage scale for all services, where artificial intelligence could help establish less subjective diagnoses. An avenue that the Montpellier University Hospital, where Xavier Bobbia works, is currently studying.