2024-01-12 09:09:36
While all patients had the same description of their symptoms, “respondents estimated that more life-threatening emergencies affected men (62%) than women (49%),” notes the study.
Caregivers who work in emergency departments tend, according to a study published in December in the European Journal of Emergency Medicine and noted by Midi Libre, to take women and black people presenting symptoms of coronary syndrome less seriously. acute.
The latter presents itself in particular by “very strong pain in the chest, with a feeling of oppression” and symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, sweating or anxiety, according to the Health Insurance website. It can lead to a heart attack.
Vital emergencies more associated with men
For this study, 1,563 emergency doctors, residents or nurses working in emergency departments in France, Belgium, Switzerland or Monaco received a questionnaire.
This included an image of a patient, with a description of his symptoms suggestive of acute coronary syndrome. Participants had to determine the level of urgency of this case, as they usually do in their departments. But they did not all receive the same image: their gender and ethnicity differed among the participants.
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While all patients had the same description of their symptoms, “respondents estimated that more life-threatening emergencies affected men (62%) than women (49%),” notes the study. “This might be due to a more severe presentation of men consulting in the emergency room or to more frequent clinical vignettes presenting men in medical training,” explain its authors.
Black patients ‘less likely to receive emergency treatment’
“Compared to white patients, black patients were less likely to receive emergency treatment,” the article adds. Respondents more often believed that patients with North African appearance had a life-threatening emergency (61%) than white (58%), Asian (55%), and black (47%) appearances. And for black women, double punishment: only 42% of those questioned see them in a vital emergency.
Among the limitations of this study, the authors note that the sample is not representative of the general population because “only doctors, residents and nurses motivated to answer the questionnaire are represented”. Furthermore, the images used were generated by artificial intelligence, and even if the query carried out was the same, the result gave a corpulence, a position, a grimace and a different look according to each profile generated, “which might influence the evaluation of the priority and especially the level of pain”.
A delay that can be dangerous
This is not the first time that discrimination in medical care has been highlighted. A study published in May 2022 in the medical journal Jama found, for example, that women were “more likely” to experience delays in triage (which consists of determining which cases are the most urgent) following serious trauma than men. A case marked France in 2017: that of Naomi Musenga, who died of an abdominal stroke following being treated with contempt by a Samu operator.
This type of reaction is not without consequences: “when we assess that a case is less serious, we diagnose later”, alerts Libération Xavier Bobbia, head of emergencies at Montpellier University Hospital and co-author of the study. “Carers must realize that they live in a society which makes them have prejudices. We must not deny them,” he believes.
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