A doctor’s race or gender matters little to patients
Study shows there are no signs of gender or racial bias when patients are being treated by a black man, a black woman, a white man or a white woman
In an online experiment, people gave ‘simulated’ ED doctors roughly the same satisfaction rating, regardless of the doctor’s gender or race.
People’s confidence in the doctor’s abilities did not appear to be affected by the doctor’s race or gender, according to the report in JAMA Network Open.
US researchers recruited 3200 people from two platforms commonly used in academic research — Amazon Mechanical Turk and Lucid — who were asked to pretend they were patients who had gone to the ED.
Participants were all given the same scenario: they had gone to the ED for symptoms consistent with gastroenteritis, including cramping, diarrhoea and vomiting.
