Collecting missing demographic data is the first step to fighting racism in healthcare
To create targeted programs to treat specific health issues, healthcare practitioners need proper demographic information about the population they are seeking to target. (Unsplash/)Without a doubt, racism is a public health issue. As such, tackling it requires support at every government level. Enacting change in this way also requires collecting and evaluating data. But failing to collect that needed information has been a cornerstone of American institutional racism.“The way that we measure health is very significant, because we can tell which groups in the population are doing well, and which are falling behind,” says Henrie Monteith Treadwell, director of the Morehouse School of Medicine’s Community Voices and Men’s Health Initiative in Atlanta, Georgia. “When we look at the information, it’s clear that the health of Black people in this country is not good. We have much more incidence of disease, and it’s not improving. One of the big questions...