Target Audience

Healthcare professionals.

Description from Dr. Nelson

As a white physician in the United States, I was unaware of issues of race, racism, and whiteness and how these play out in the health of people of color. This is the experience of most physicians and health care providers. I will share my personal experiences with interpersonal and institutional barriers within healthcare. I will also describe some of the tools and interventions I have found successful in starting to move the needle toward true social justice to improve health equity measures. 

This lecture will focus on defining terms around race, racism, and whiteness. I will discuss how racial narratives affect our biases and decision-making, negatively affecting outcomes for our patients of color and other underrepresented and historically oppressed groups. Although the focus will be on race, these processes transcend race and affect all marginalized people. 

This presentation is born out of my work as a physician and the recognition of the impact of racism and provider bias on racial disparities in health care. I have been studying, researching, and training on this content extensively for the last ten years and, with Dr. Heather Hackman, have conducted racial justice training for physicians, nurses, students, and others in the Upper Midwest and nationally. As a result, I have accrued a body of information regarding the transformation of racial disparities and share that content in this presentation. 

Objectives

• Recognize race as an independent factor in health equity.
• List three barriers to health equity, including how racism affects health.
• Describe how implicit bias and stereotyping on the part of providers impact racial disparities in health care, especially for children.
• Utilize concrete tools for moving towards health equity and improving our self-efficacy in treating our patients of color.

Speaker

Stephen C. Nelson, MD
Hackman Consulting Group

Dr. Stephen Nelson is a physician specializing in treating Sickle Cell Disease at Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He attended medical school and completed his pediatric residency at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia. His pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship was completed at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. Dr. Nelson joined the hematology/oncology program at the Children’s of Minnesota in 1993. Dr. Nelson received a Bush Fellowship in 2009 to study the role of racism in the treatment of patients with SCD and has presented the findings of that study, conducted with Dr. Hackman, at conferences, staff development sessions, and professional meetings, and more recently has co-authored an article on the findings with Dr. Hackman.