Discrimination Against the Elderly Population in the Medical Field

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Description of the Event
Self- Reflection
Conclusion

Introduction

In the community, disease prevalence is a major challenge that requires proper intervention approaches to enable the vulnerable population to overcome the problems. It is the responsibility of providers to ensure patients, despite their age, gender, ethnicity, or occupation, obtain equal services without discrimination. When practitioners embrace the aspect of equity in care provision, it becomes easier to promote and improve the overall healthcare outcome. In addition, in the medical field, the conduct of providers is essential in encouraging the engagement of patients to enhance their cooperation in care delivery. However, in most cases, physicians tend to discriminate against certain groups of patients thus making the individuals receive limited medical attention. Encountering such events in the field is a significant platform that has the potential to improve providers’ experience in managing community healthcare.

Description of the Event

At the elapse of the final semester, I was enrolled in the Department of Geriatrics at X Hospital Qatar to refine the clinical skills I mastered throughout my second year of medical school. The department was populated considering the coronavirus pandemic and how it affected the elderly. As an attaché, my mandate was to mark the patient’s daily routine. The first week I was preoccupied, being my first time interacting with the older patients and also the fact that it was my first week and I was just getting used to the environment. Midway through my second week, I noticed peculiar gestures from the patients. Their reactions when I was with them were different from the reactions when a clinician was always around. They would change their attitude from being happy and jovial to being dull. Some even became rude or did not just talk at all. These reactions sparked concerns and I decided to inquire about their triggered reactions. I started engaging them, but their response was always weird: “Leave me, I am too old to die” or “It is high time I dozed off this hospital.”

Luckily on 6th September, as I was through with my daily tasks, I found a responsive patient. She was aged 53, a black, obese, medium-height African woman. The patient had been in the clinic for the past three weeks, and her health condition was drastically deteriorating despite the services being provided within the facility. As we interacted, she mentioned how her condition was worsened by the clinicians ‘interaction. She recalls how the clinicians would always judge her by her age, would always talk rudely to her, and even to an extent, tell her that she was just too old to be given attention. She continued how the clinicians would rudely handle their treatment and sometimes did not check on them at all. She concluded that they were being treated unfairly and their health concerns were not taken seriously by health professionals because of their age. She cumulated the facts that her being black and fat also abetted in further discrimination.

Self- Reflection

Intellectual Improvement

Based on the encounters I had during the medical fieldwork, the exposure offered me a great opportunity to improve both my work experience and professional advancement. The program allowed me to interact with people of different age groups that require special attention from providers. The interaction increased my ability to communicate effectively and address the needs of individuals seeking medical services. In addition, I gained competence in solving problems involving technical issues that require an optimal solution to better the well-being of the community. For this, I had to give my best by stepping up for an additional commitment to team building and social interaction. Furthermore, I frequently interacted with clinicians which enabled me to gather more experience and comprehend how the providers strive to achieve such success and their determination. These boosted my knowledge and also prepared me psychologically to handle patience and as well in adapting to the healthcare environment. To patients, I was more of knowing their conditions, how their stay is, and their perceptions.

Professional Development

Engaging in the practice significantly improved my professional development in the medical field. Based on my experience, I am now capable of managing different situations involving patients who are aged. The training made me understand how such individuals should be handled to promote their responsiveness to medication. Furthermore, the exposure has improved my skills that are necessary for operating in unique departments such as geriatrics. I improved my confidence in interacting with others and also realized the urgency of getting to know how others feel. Engaging with the patient, who was 53 years of age, and getting to know her opinions about the Geriatrics department enabled me to identify the issues that caused the patient’s attitude to shift. I realized how clinicians were discriminative and judgmental towards the old patients.

How I Could Have Improved the Value of What I Learned

After reflecting on my experience, I understood that even the medical field has problems. This contradicted my first impression of how excellent the sector was at providing equal and transparent services to all individuals. I realized that elderly patients were always dull and incorporative because they did not receive the attention or treatment they felt they required or were treated unfairly, with the impression that their health issues were not taken seriously by health professionals due to prejudice. Older persons who encountered prejudice were more likely to have poorer health, incur economic difficulties, and be dissatisfied with their care than those who did not.

I believe that my engagement with the patients and trying to have their opinions and thoughts helped in realize that the patients were not treated fairly as per their expectations. The interaction created my awareness of the clinicians’ attitudes towards the aged and sparked concerns about the causes of such discrimination for improvement. According to one of the patients, the clinicians did not regard their health as important due to their age. With their expressions and embedded experience in mind, I was convinced that the medical field did not have much concern for the aged. However, I was concerned about knowing the patients’ problems rather than ways of improving them. My weakness in not finding the solution to their problem gave me a purpose and urged me to find better solutions to such discrimination. Therefore, I learned that to eradicate discrimination in the medical field, we must ensure we create a good rapport between clinicians and patients.

Conclusion

Fighting prejudice in the health care system is critical to improving health equity. Given that older individuals consume significantly more healthcare services than younger people and that the population is rapidly aging, tackling prejudice in healthcare settings is particularly critical for older people. Ending healthcare prejudice begins with acknowledging it and then actively working to deconstruct it. As a result, my future step in eradicating prejudice in the medical industry will be to encourage openness and accountability by recognizing instances of discrimination and publicly publishing discrimination data. I am convinced that with the interacting skills I have acquired and the patient-doctor relation, better service and only be provided where two interact freely and willingly. My action will be to create diversity and eradicate the barriers that make clinicians discriminate against aged patients to enhance equity.

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