Black women are most likely to have a negative interaction during care and prefer to see a Black provider.
A majority of Black adults have had at least one negative experience with a health care provider, according to a new report. But young Black women are particularly likely to report a harmful interaction during routine health care.
More than 70% of Black women ages 18 to 49 said they’ve experienced at least one negative interaction with care providers, including dismissal of their pain or having to speak up to get proper care. Young Black women also are most likely to prefer seeing a Black doctor, expressing that health care providers who share their racial background are better at looking out for their best interests and treating them respectfully.
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The finding was one of many in a Pew Research Center study that analyzed Black Americans’ perspectives on science, including medicine, health care, STEM education and science-related news.
Researchers highlighted the nuanced views Black adults hold about scientists and the health care system. Of the more than 14,000 participants, Black adults made up about 3,500 including those who identify as single-race, multiracial, and Hispanic.
Among Black women, “a lot of patients don’t feel heard,” said Cheryl Clark, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “They don’t always feel that their symptoms are taken seriously.”
And the impact is dire. Across the United States, Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the crisis has grown.
“It’s really important to take a look at what young Black women are saying about their caregiving experiences if we want to prevent that mortality,” said Clark, who is a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
The study also found that Black Americans’ trust for medical scientists has dropped since November 2020, a trend similar to the general public. Among white adults, the decline has been particularly significant. According to the study, there is now little difference in how white, Black, and Hispanic adults view medical scientists, a shift from prior surveys in which white adults were more likely to report high confidence in them.
More than 60% of Black adults report believing that serious medical misconduct is just as likely today as it was in the past, although those with more knowledge of the work medical researchers do were more likely to view them positively.
In the survey, researchers highlighted the Tuskegee experiment, during which Black men were intentionally denied treatment for syphilis beginning in the 1930s, as an extreme breach of trust. But individual interactions with the health care system may have an even larger impact, said Darrell Hudson, a health disparities researcher at the University of Washington St. Louis. Stories told within families and local communities about which hospitals mistreat Black patients erode trust in health and medicine.
“There are individual, patient-provider-level interactions, things that I’m not even sure providers are aware that they do that might be read as dismissive or might be seen as disrespectful,” he said. “Those reinforce the notion that these people don’t care about us.”
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