African Americans (AA) Communities Speak: Partnering With AA in the North and South to Train Palliative Care Clinicians to Address Interpersonal and Systemic Racism and Provide Culturally Aligned Care.
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Summary
African Americans are less likely to receive quality end-of-life (EoL) care. Addressing disparities in EoL care will need efforts to support a better understanding of African American patients' EoL cultural values and preferences for EoL communication and the impact of historical and ongoing care delivery inequities in healthcare settings. Our proposed "Caring for Older African Americans" training program is designed to empower clinicians to improve goal-concordant EoL care delivery by using community-developed storytelling videos to create empathy with experiences of racism in EoL care, guidelines for culturally concordant EoL care delivery, and an implicit bias recognition and management training to mitigate bias in goals of care communication.
Description
African Americans (AA) are less likely to receive quality end-of-life (EoL) care. For example, goals of care conversations, which are critical discussions between clinicians, patients, and families near the end of life, are less likely to occur for AAs than for Whites, and preferences are less likely to be followed when they do occur. Instead, families are more likely to be labeled as "difficult" if their decisions are incongruent with clinicians' recommendations. EoL decisions for many AA persons are rooted in both culture and a lifetime of experiences of structural racism. Efforts to address…