Black Health Education Collaborative is at the forefront of addressing anti-Black racism in health care

BY PAUL JUNOR

The creation of the Black Health Education Collaborative (BHEC) will no doubt play a leading role in dismantling anti-Black racism in the Canadian health care system.

Alexandra Mae Jones published details about this collaboration of African-Canadian health practitioners. The article states they are “Aiming to create the first health primer of its kind to educate health care providers and ultimately improve care for Black Canadians.”

The BHEC was in the process of development for some time, but with the appointment of an Executive Director in August 2021, it will be able to gain momentum. Dr. Onye Nnoroam, one of the founders of BHEC told CTV News, “I think this is a really unique time in history, where there is much greater mainstream awareness and desire to change when it comes to addressing anti-Black racism. And in my work with medical students, even right now, they are so keen and enthusiastic to learn about anti-Black racism, how they can help to address it, how they can treat their own patients with dignity, and think about health care in a different light.” 

Dr. Nnoram teaches at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, where she is an Assistant Professor and Associate Program Director of the Public Health and Preventive Medicine Residency Program. She identifies three areas in which the BHEC will concentrate on:

• Anti-Black racism and how it impacts health
• How it also impacts the quality of care that Black people receive when they’re in health care
• Amplify community voices, solutions, and approaches to improve the quality of health care that Black people and a number of different members of our society receive

Dr. Nnorom has played a significant function as the Black HealthTeam Lead in the faculty of medicine at the University of Toronto since 2016. In this position, she was responsible for gathering resources that would shed light on anti-Black racism and its impact on patients. In her work, she became aware that there was a dearth of medical information for health care providers regarding how to work with the Black population. She states, “So even though we’re the third largest, quite unquote, visible minority group in Canada, either there was nothing about us in the materials or it was often the wrong information.”

Furthermore, she notes, “There isn’t a textbook or an online resource that really speaks to the Black population in a Canadian context, the social factors that impact Black community health and all of the other intersecting factors like culture. There is also a lack of race-based data.”

It was after a conversation with Dr.OmiSoore Dryden that the decision to collaborate with other Black health practitioners began to develop. Starting in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic and continuing afterwards in 2020 in the wake of the racial unrest in America and worldwide, they were able to narrow their focus. She states, “So now we were faced with a situation where we no longer had to explain what anti-Black racism was to our colleagues in health care, and there was a greater awareness that this was a problem.” This resulted in the BHEC enlarging their vision beyond delivering modules and online resources to educating medical professionals themselves.

Dr Nnoram recognizes that there are direct consequences when the medical community is not aware of how anti-Black racism affects Black health especially through implicit biases, negative stereotypes, structural racism and explicit biases.

The primer and modules that the BHEC are working on will be made available online, along with other resources to medical schools across Canada.

Dr. Nnorom is confident that this will improve the health outcomes of Black patients. She states, “I think that is what gives me the greatest hope. It’s not just what we’re going to be providing educational resources, but it’s the fact that there is such a great welcoming for this type of information. There’s a genuine desire for it across health care.”

Other members of the BHEC include: Dr. OmiSoore Dryden, Dr.Delia Douglas, Prof. Sume Ndumbe-Eyoh, Dr. Barbara Hamilton-Hinch and Dr.Gaynor Watson-Creed.