c) Ethnoracial Discrimination: The Beliefs of Practitioners

Women of Color in Peace, Security and Conflict Transformation The Race Across the Pond Initiative: Women of Color in the Healthcare System Series

religious and racial discrimination, some doctors not even trying to hide behind laborious administrative justication to refuse to provide medical care.

Some of the policy recommendations identified include:

● Distribute professionals and health centers based on needs and territorial specificities. ● Strengthen the pre-existing structures in the aforementioned medical deserts in terms of human, financial, and material resources. ● Set up a system of language interpretation that is available systematically during medical consultations at the request of the patient or the health care professional.

c) Ethnoracial Discrimination: The Beliefs of Practitioners

Prejudice in the medical profession is also prevalent on the staff level. Some CSS beneficiary patients are often denied consultation or considered a non-priority because doctors perceive them as “assisted” or “ profiteers.” Other times, healthcare professionals delay providing care due to stereoping patients and pre-assigning supposed negative behaviours and moral characteristics (ability to comply, capacity to understand a treatment, to understand the gravity of their symptoms, or to take care of themselves). They judge patients’ ability to comply or understand the importance of their symptoms according to the latters’ ethnic attributes, body habitus (way of moving or carrying oneself), or low socio-economic backgrounds.

According to a European Union survey on minorities and discrimination, most members of RMGs acknowledge being discriminated against based on their ethnic origin, skin color (especially people with black skin or of sub-Saharan origin), religion (in particular veiled Muslim women), their surname (sounding Arabic, Asian, or sub-Saharan), or their accent. It is noteworthy that the Roma people were among the RMGs who reported facing discrimination by health care practioners.

Discrimination in health care is multifaceted, but mostly attributable to RMGs’ actual or perceived ethnic origin, historical heritage of immigration and ghettoization public policies, and a culturalist vision of medical needs. Indeed, some of RMGs’ health problems are often interpreted as due to cultural specificities and inherent in the cultural origin of the patients. The resulting inequities are reinforced by not taking into consideration social determinants of health (such as income, housing, geographic location, education, and food shortage) during the initial investigation of medical history. This type of discrimination also influences medical care, the relationship with