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Faculty Notes Recent news and accomplishments
Rooting Out Inequities
The role implicit bias plays in the public realm is finally being grounded in research, data and science. SSW Professor Ora Nakash, M.A., Ph.D., aims to bring that understanding to a decidedly more private realm: the offices of mental health clinicians. Nakash, chair of the Human Behavior in the Social Environment sequence, has researched mental health disparities among racial and ethnic minority groups for 15 years with a goal of improving access to and quality of care for people from marginalized communities. Her work explores the role of
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unconscious provider bias in quality of care and treatment outcomes. Her findings suggest that clinicians make assumptions about clients based on their social identity, leading them to miss vital information that would provide a more accurate understanding of the issues bringing clients into the office. “We find that socially advantaged clinicians have more misdiagnoses with minority clients compared to socially advantaged clients,” said Nakash. This failure to collect adequate information can have a ripple effect, signaling to the client that
S M I T H COL L E G E SCHO O L FO R SO CIAL WO RK
the provider lacks an understanding, which in turn makes the client more reticent and less likely to engage, exacerbating potential misunderstandings. Multiple factors come into play when it comes to inequities in mental health care for members of minority groups, including structural ones such as cost, accessibility and language barriers. Nakash is trying to more fully understand the subjective factors brought in by providers themselves; these include implicit biases among providers, language and cultural barriers and “cultural disfluency,” when
