This week in Pediatrics(10.1542/peds.2020-029025), we publish a Special Article that provides different perspectives on race, implicit biases, and how we respond to these in clinical medicine. Shannon Adams is a medical student, Tamika White Davis is the parent of twin boys who spent their early days in the NICU, and Dr. Beatrice Lechner is a neonatologist.
Each of them provides a narrative about their experiences:
- A medical student who is Black and relates experiences in which she provides hope to and receives encouragement from patients who are Black.
- A mother who, because she is Black, felt that she had to present herself as the “right” kind of Black NICU mother so that the physicians, nurses, and others caring for her sons would like her and thus treat her sons better.
- A neonatologist who thought that she had a great collaborative working relationship with a family (who was Black) until the family’s baby became much sicker, and their distrust of a neonatologist and care team that was exclusively White became more apparent.
Although “NICU” is in the title, the insights that I gained were ones that are applicable to everyone in health care, no matter where you work. This article made me re-examine my implicit biases, and I hope that it will do the same for you as well.
