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Monday, September 11, 2017

Privilege and Palliative Care

by Denise Hess

An American pastor recently visited Australia and encountered a curious practice. At the start of meetings, any kind of meeting not just religious ones, she found it is common practice to begin with what is called an “acknowledgment of country.” According to reconciliation.org.au:

An Acknowledgement of Country is an opportunity for anyone to show respect for Traditional Owners and the continuing connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to Country. It can be given by both non-Indigenous people and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
And it goes something like this:
“I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet today. I would also like to pay my respects to Elders past and present.”
I happened to hear this story from that American pastor the same week of the Charlottesville protests and counter protests, and the same week I watched the HBO adaptation of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. These events made me think again about the role of race in palliative care.

In over a decade of working in palliative care, I can say with confidence that I have never met an all-out “racist” palliative care physician, nurse, social worker, or chaplain. However, everyone of us has biases, prejudices, preconceived ideas of how people “should” act and what they “ought” to do, and we carry these biases with us wherever we go. Awareness helps, efforts to counter bias help, but we cannot rid ourselves of bias.

For example, I don’t think I am alone in noticing that I have pre-conceived ideas and expectations about how a patient or their loved ones will respond to palliative care interventions based on their cultural and ethnic background. This is bias. We are all infected with it.

Also, many of us have been given an unearned advantage, by accident of birth, called privilege, that
opens doors we didn’t even realize were closed to others. Privilege is as invisible as air unless you don’t have it and want to breathe. For example, whites and people of color are likely to have vastly different experiences of serious illness and palliative care. As has been well documented by bright minds among us1, people of color tend to receive a lesser-quality version of palliative care2 after receiving less preventative care, later diagnosis, and more challenging access to curative care in the first place.3

As a white woman, if I were diagnosed with a serious illness, I would likely receive high quality palliative care, assistance with advance care planning, excellent pain and symptom management, and help to die in the place of my choice. As a person of color, I may not receive any of the above.

The excellent health insurance I have is the result of the job I have, which is the result of the education I have, which is the result of the family I have, which is the result of the access they had to jobs, education, and opportunities, which is the result in large part of where they were born, when they were born, the color of their skin, the color of their eyes, the texture of their hair. Without those things, I could be without quality health insurance, showing up in the emergency room for primary care. Chance of birth is the source of my privilege.

To add to that, we are all part of health care systems that have institutionalized, operationalized, and standardized racism as part and parcel of their business models. Racism is embedded within the very fiber of organizations and shows up as disparities, lack of access, uneven quality, poor care coordination, and lower patient safety outcomes.

So how to respond? White guilt is not the answer. White guilt makes me the subject and people of color the object once again. White guilt only changes optics, not practices, and definitely not institutions or systems. However, using privilege for the benefit of others can help. Using our voices and our influence over organizations on behalf of those who have been shut out or excluded from various tables of influence can effect change. But even better, using our privilege to lift up the voices of people of color is an excellent step in the right direction.

“But,” I hear you say, “I am a busy (fill-in-the-blank-doctor-nurse-social worker-chaplain), I don’t have time to use my voice to change the system. I’m just trying to finish my documentation!” Fair enough. Yet, spending the currency in our bank of privilege on behalf of others does not have to (but absolutely can) include protest marches, trips to Washington DC, or even visits to the C suites. We can spread our wealth of privilege in simple yet powerful acts like our friends’ in Australia “acknowledgment of country.” Here are a few palliative care possibilities:

  1. Include a person of color in a case presentation as a “positive” example, e.g. not “noncompliant,” “resistant to palliative care,” “opposed to advance care planning.”
  2. Increase your cultural curiosity and competence through relationships with those outside your cultural group.
  3. Read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (as a start) or watch the film 13th, or I Am Not Your Negro and discuss as a team.
  4. Assess your team’s cultural reach. What groups are over/underrepresented in your patient census based on your local demographics?
  5. Inventory your language. Notice where and when you use terms such as “difficult” patient or, “resistant” family, or when you go into a family meeting with the expectation that the family will "want everything done.”
  6. Watch for “acknowledgment of country” moments when meeting with patients and their loved ones. Are there opportunities to name the ways disparities may be impacting a patient’s situation? Was care difficult to access? Was quality of care poor? Talk about it.

These micro-non-aggressions and micro-extensions of our own privilege on behalf of others are not insignificant. We do not need to be the “white saviors.” We do not need to lead the charge to eradicate racism from our institutions. That would be appropriation. We need to be allies, learning from the experiences of persons of color, always stepping aside to make room for the neglected voices that need to be heard and honored.

Denise Hess MDiv, BCC-HPCC, LMFT is a palliative care chaplain and marriage and family therapist who currently serves as the Executive Director of the Supportive Care Coalition. She is currently on a quest to try all the donuts in Portland, Oregon.

References
1 Johnson KS. Racial and ethnic disparities in palliative care. J of Palliat Med 2013;16(11). Open Access PDF
2 Welch LC, Teno JM, Mor V. End-of-life care in black and white: race matters for medical care of dying patients and their families. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2005 53(7).
3 2016 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; July 2017.

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