Racism in Medicine: Education and Employment

Abstract

There is an ethnicity attainment gap that appears in early education and persists into the senior levels of the NHS. Disadvantage and discrimination is certainly pervasive for Chinese, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian students, but this editorial will focus on how Black students appear to be systematically disadvantaged compared to their white peers, as factors of social and cultural biases and class work to create layers of disadvantage that work against them from their education to their medical careers.

Racism exists in both the UK education system and in healthcare, not only through biases and prejudices, conscious or unconscious, but also through the systemic lack of racial and cultural literacy that exists in those institutions and their practices. Here we consider the ways in which racism presents itself in the journey of a Black doctor, from childhood to employment, and how it may produce this attainment gap.

Because research often groups subjects into a collective BAME category, that term is used here, but care has been taken to disaggregate those groups where possible.