>>Lord Victor Adebowale: So, I’m Lord Victor Adebowale, and I want to talk to you about
‘Bias’.
Bias has been well studied, well researched, we kind of understand how it works, but let
me give you my take. People are biased, that’s not the issue. The issue is whether you are
willing to take responsibility for your biases, and whether you leave them at the door or
take them into your interactions with patients. If you take them into your communication with
patients, then they will affect, not only how you see that patient but how that patient
sees you?
Now I know if you’re watching this film, that you want to do the best for your patients.
And that means understanding ‘your biases’, opening your mind to learning so that your
patient can learn from and with you.
This is a film about ‘Bias’, please watch it and learn.
>>Darshna Soni: The original surgeon that I saw, this was when I had newly been diagnosed
so it was quite a stressful time. I had a couple of meetings with him which left me
feeling very uncomfortable.
My husband happens to have his own business, he works, you know, very hard, he’s got
a good job. He’d taken the day off to come to the hospital with me. It was very cold,
so he happened to be wearing a hoodie. My husband happens to be black.
So we walked in, he was a black guy in his hoodie, I was an Asian lady, we just felt
straight away that the surgeon was making assumptions about us.
>>Rebecca Hemmings: With the consultant, when I went in I went in with pumps, you know I
had leggings on and a little bomber jacket… and I remember thinking to myself, ‘Was
it the way that I dressed?’
He was surprised by the questions I was asking, so I just felt as though he had a perception
about who I was. Was it because I was a woman, I don’t know, I felt perhaps more it was
because I was black. What I don’t need, is when I’m being told I’ve got cancer,
for people to again to have a pre-judgment about me, that’s what I felt.
>>Darshna Soni: We had loads of questions, because it was all very raw, we just had the
diagnosis. But he was very patronising, and he actually rolled his eyes a couple of times
when we asked questions, so we just felt we couldn’t speak to him.
>>Darshna Soni: This was the person who should’ve been helping us at that time, who should’ve
been our partner if you like in discussing my care, in discussing options, decisions
that I had to make about treatment. And so it had a huge impact upon me in the first
few weeks after diagnosis.
>>Roger Kline: There’s an interesting relationship between bias and discrimination. Bias is often
hard to see in individual cases, and there’s a risk sometimes that people think, ‘Well
everybody’s biased, there’s not much we can do about it.’ But the reality is, there
are plenty of things we can do about it, once we recognise that there’s a problem.
We know from the data, the perception of black and minority ethnic patients with cancer about
their treatment, is that it is significantly worse than the perceptions of white patients
with cancer about their treatment. There needs to be a conversation to try to understand
what’s happening here, why the experience is worse and how it can be changed. Because
if the experience is worse, there must be a risk that it is affecting the sorts of treatments
that are prescribed, the way in which people are treated, the referrals that take place.
>>Darshna Soni: You know, all it takes is for somebody to treat you equally, to shake
your hand, to look you in the eye. Little things like that can have such a big impact
on the way you feel and the way you trust them to go forward with your care. That I
think that would have a huge difference if people could remember that, and address that
every time they saw a patient.
>>Jenny Harris: She was just very warm in the delivery of the news, because when I first
met her… Yes, I had been told that I had cancer but I didn’t know what it meant and
I didn’t understand that there was different types of cancer, I didn’t understand that
there were different types of treatment? And she explained that my treatment was going
to be tailor made for me?
I never felt, that I was just going to be left. That I’d be delivered this huge bombshell
and that I was going to be on my own. She explained exactly when I would see her, you
know how often that was going to be, and what her job was and what her role was, to help
me to get to the end of my journey.
>>Roger Kline: It’s really important, that doctors, nurses, paramedics and other staff
understand. Bias is real, it’s all around us and we’re all biased. And the intelligent
thing to do is to recognise that bias exists, because then you’ve got some chance of diminishing
its impact. If you deny it, you can’t deal with it.