DR DOLPHIN
SPRING 2021
Lectures BMJ ‘Born Equal - Racism in Medicine’ Lecture In this lecture on the process of putting together the British Medical Journal (BMJ) ‘Born Equal-Racism in Medicine’ issue, Zosia Kmietowicz (news editor), Navjoyt Ladher (head of education) and Juliet Dobson (opinion and bmj.com editor) discussed the dilemmas they encountered whilst compiling articles for the journal and the steps they took to resolve them in order to publish and shed light on the experiences of doctors and patients from minority ethnic backgrounds and how little progress has been made in combating racism and prejudice within medicine. With the senior editor team responding positively once the idea of an issue dedicated to the topic was proposed, the team invited guest editors Victor Adebowale (chair of the NHS Confederation, crossbench member of the House of Lords, former NHS board member) and Mala Rao (senior clinical fellow at Imperial College London and medical adviser to NHS England’s workforce race equality, both of whom have been extremely vocal in their calls to hold the healthcare system accountable for the racism that is perpetuated within it. In this way, every decision that was made would be well-informed from all angles with advice from the most influential voices.
With this in mind, they engaged in many conversations surrounding the various ethical dilemmas. One such dilemma they faced was naming the prejudice experienced by doctors and patients from minority ethnic backgrounds from various areas of the medical sphere, be that medical schools, the NHS and/or regulators etc. This question, the editors explained, was quickly resolved with a unanimous decision that there should be no hesitancy to call it what it is - racism. However, what dominated the majority of discussions was the collective terms to be used within the issue. During the lecture, the speakers pinpointed the various collective terms that were brought up in the meetings and their reasoning for their conclusion, which was to use the term ‘ethnic minority’, ensuring that specificity is maintained throughout i.e. avoiding use of umbrella terms as much as possible. Some of the terms that were mentioned included Black and Minority Ethnic (BME); Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME); Person of Colour (POC); Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC); non-White and ethnic minority. Collective terms such as
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