Race and Ethnicity in Health and Illness Flashcards
What is culture?
Culture is an array of shared implicit mental precepts regulating understanding and behaviour
What is ethnicity?
Ethnicity is utilised to denote some form of distinctive cultural characteristics such as common geographical and ancestral origins, language and cultural traditions.
Why is ethnicity important?
It’s used as a variable to subdivide the population for purposes of health research and for service provision.
Allows to identify social groups different from the majority.
What is the key difference between ethnic group and ethnic origin?
Ethnic group is based on an individual conception of social group membership + personal identity. Ethnic origin however is an allocated definition based on common ancestry or place of origin.
When is the “Not stated (Z)” category of NHS ethnicity coding used?
When the person has been given the opportunity to state their ethnic category but choses not to
What are problems with the NHS ethnic coding approach?
- Coding assumed fixed ethnic boundaries, where often they are fluid and imprecise
- Ethnic and cultural boundaries are a constructed and maintained by social groups themselves so can change - labels of ethnic difference are often imposed by ‘outsiders’ / the majority group in society
- Can result in artefactual data as ethnicity is abstract construct and not concrete
What is race?
Another social construct - modern biology and genetics would not recognise the existence of separate biological human ‘races’.
Humans are one species displaying variation due to historical population distributions w/ genetic mutations defining particular haplogroups related to geography.
Why is it wrong to suggest people from one ethnic group always get a disease and another ethnic group not?
Some diseases are common among certain ethnic groups but there are no diseases that always include/exclude all members of one ethnic group.
Also there is more variability in genetic differences within any population that there is among racial/ethnic populations.
What are institutional practices?
The hidden curriculum, where medical students are taught one thing but see another in practice.
How do institutional practices play a problematic role in cultural awareness? What can it lead to?
They can reinforce and construct norms of ‘compliant’ patient behaviour and when faced with patients from ethnic minorities, they often fall outside these constructed norms of patient behaviour.
This process -> institutional racism
