Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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To identify racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in the emergency department (ED) care for mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). ⋯ There are significant racial and ethnic but not gender disparities in ED care for mTBI. The causes of these disparities and the relationship between these disparities and post-mTBI outcome need to be examined.
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Education is the means by which learning occurs and, thereby, behavior is changed. One means of improving health care disparities is changing the behavior and understanding of key personnel in academic health centers. These individuals influence policy and procedure, design and evaluate health systems, and define curricular standards for graduate and undergraduate medical education. ⋯ In addition to our responsibilities in educating emergency medicine residents, the emergency department also provides an ideal learning environment for medical students and other health care providers. The broad issue of disparities in emergency health care may be approached from a variety of directions. The Consensus Group on Education chose to focus on cultural competency education at several levels as a means of tangibly changing its status for both the immediate and long terms.
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The recent Institute of Medicine report "Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care" chronicles a growing body of literature describing racial and ethnic disparities in health care delivery. It suggests a research agenda designed to better understand and eventually eliminate these disparities. ⋯ One of the goals of that meeting was to develop a research agenda for emergency medicine researchers working on disparities in health care. This report describes the results of the consensus conference and suggests such a research agenda.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
The effect of race/ethnicity and desirable social characteristics on physicians' decisions to prescribe opioid analgesics.
Racial/ethnic disparities in physician treatment have been documented in multiple areas, including emergency department (ED) analgesia. The purpose of this study was to determine if physicians were predisposed to different treatment decisions based on patient race/ethnicity and if physicians' treatment predispositions changed when socially desirable information about the patient (occupation, socioeconomic status, and relationship with a primary care physician) was made explicit. ⋯ Patient race/ethnicity did not influence physicians' predispositions to treatment plans in clinical vignettes. Even knowing that the patient had a high-prestige occupation and a primary care provider only minimally increased prescribing of opioid analgesics for conditions with few objective findings.