Rahni Jenkins is vice president of mission operations for March of Dimes. She oversees the organization’s Awareness to Action: Dismantling Bias in Maternal and Infant Healthcare™ training program. Implicit biases are unconscious attitudes or stereotypes that can affect our understanding, actions and decisions. The training helps health care providers learn to recognize their biases and teaches strategies for mitigating them. But as Jenkins says, training doesn’t fix everything. Mitigating bias takes practice.
Q. How do implicit biases impact racial disparities in maternal health?
Many of us aren’t aware of our own biases. Let’s say a person was raised to believe certain stereotypes. They might automatically have assumptions about certain types of individuals. That can show up in the way a provider interacts with patients or in actual treatment decisions. That’s implicit bias.
For example, a longstanding stereotype is that Black women feel less pain than white women. It’s not true. But that bias, even if it’s unconscious, could result in a patient’s not receiving the medication they need to ease the pain. It could result in a provider dismissing that pain and missing a real health emergency. We have to consider how our assumptions truly affect the life or death of a person. Until we do, racial disparities will persist.
Implicit bias training is a great way to begin making those biases conscious, learning strategies to address them and really practice changing behaviors. We're not perfect, but if we keep practicing, we're going to improve those care spaces one person at a time.
Q. Black birthing people continue to die at three to four times the rate of whites. How do we move forward in the face of such stark statistics?
We know the statistics for Black maternal health are going in the wrong direction. Black moms are still dying at much higher rates than white moms. We can’t forget that. And we can’t forget that everyone deserves the safest, highest quality birth experience possible. I believe that’s possible, and we can all play a role to make that happen—individually and collaboratively. For example, are you advocating for improved laws, for more resources in areas that lack access to quality care? Also, I’m seeing local and federal government, communities, health care providers, foundations, payers, policymakers and others collaborating more than ever to tackle this problem. That gives me hope.