Inferior qualifications and less access to resources
among doctors who treat black patients may contribute to racial
disparities in the quality of U.S. health care, authors of a study
said on Wednesday. The study, published in Thursday's New England
Journal of Medicine, found that many of the doctors treating black
patients complain they don't have the resources to adequately care for
them. "The findings paint a picture of two health systems, where
physicians treating black patients appear to have less access to
important clinical resources and be less well-trained clinically than
physicians treating white patients," said study leader Peter Bach of
the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Bach and his
team found that about a fifth of U.S. doctors - 22 percent - are
treating four-fifths of the country's black population. Moreover, 86
percent of the doctors visited by white patients tended to have
advanced training, versus 77 percent of the doctors who tended to
treat black patients, the Bach team said. [more]
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