When AuD Students Encounter Bigotry From Patients, Preceptors Must Become Allies

By Kris English, M. Dawn Nelson, and Saunja T. Burt

This article is a part of the January/February 2021, Volume 33, Number 1, Audiology Today issue.

A few years ago, a young physician reported the following experience:

During my internal medicine rotation…a patient called me a “colored girl” three times in front of the attending physician. The doctor did not correct the patient, nor did she address the incident with me privately. Despite all the other positive interactions I had with this teacher, her silence in this circumstance diminished my presence. I wondered if she thought of me as a “colored girl,” too (Okwerekwu, 2016).

This physician’s encounter with a prejudiced patient is all too common in the United States, as was her supervisor’s inaction (Garan and Rasmussan, 2019).

Health-care trainees only fairly recently began to report being demeaned by patients for their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or religion (Grady and White, 2020; Tedeschi, 2017). A systematic review of harassment during medical school, for example, found that 35 percent of trainees had been the object of patients’ discriminatory verbal abuse (Fnais et al, 2014).

Historically, there has been little attempt to prepare trainees for biased patients, leaving both trainee and preceptor caught off guard and ill-equipped to respond effectively (Wheeler et al, 2019). Consequently, when trainees experience racial and other biases from patients, they frequently report not knowing how to respond and also doubt that their superiors would act upon the complaint (Morrison et al, 2019; Paul-Emile et al, 2020).

The trainees also report fearing faculty repercussions and being perceived as unprofessional or “playing the race/ethnicity card” and, having little trust in their situation, ultimately worry about jeopardizing their evaluations (Osseo-Asare et al, 2018; Wheeler et al, 2019).