The following is a summary of “A Qualitative Study of Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Experiences of Minority Clinicians During Agitation Care in the Emergency Department” published in the February 2024  issue of Emergency Medicine by Agboola, et al.

There is evidence of racial and ethnic bias in health care at the structural, organizational, and clinical levels. The bias affects emergency care, such as how to handle patients who are distressed in the emergency department (ED). Not much is known about the experiences of racial and ethnic minority ED doctors who work with these groups, especially when they are upset. 

For a study, researchers sought to look into the real-life experiences of racial and ethnic minority ED doctors who have dealt with agitated patients. 

Individual semi-structured interviews were done with Black, Latino, and mixed doctors who worked at one of three EDs in the Northeast United States from August 2020 to June 2022. The EDs were part of an urban tertiary care medical center. Through open coding of the first transcripts and finding new codes through a series of repeated rounds of group talk, they did topic analysis. The team found main and supporting themes once the codebook was complete and used on all texts. Of the 27 people who were asked, 14 (52%) said they were Black, 9 (33%) said they were Hispanic or Latino, and 4 (15%) said they were mixed or of a different race or ethnicity. 

Three main themes came out of racial and ethnic minority clinicians’ experiences of managing agitation: seeing what they saw as unfair treatment of patients of color who were assumed to be agitated because of their race, feeling moral harm and extra work because they had to deal with unfair treatment of agitated patients at work; and naturally supporting and advocating for agitated patients of color because they share a similar identity and life experience. The research showed that racial and ethnic minority doctors had a unique view of how minority patients who were upset were treated because they were also minority clinicians. As racial and ethnic minority doctors, they had to deal with extra problems, but their allyship could help reduce problems when caring for patients who are neglected and have been historically left out.

Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0196064423012325