Melinda Tuhus Photo
More white women get breast cancer. More black women who get breast cancer die from it. When she found that out, Natalie Holder-Winfield got to work.
Holder-Winfield is organizing a “cultural competency training conference” for health care workers at Yale-New Haven Hospital’s Smilow Cancer Hospital on Nov. 6 at 11 a.m. with the aim of improving black women’s chances.
Holder-Winfield’s event comes after a recent article in Cancer magazine about a seven-year study of over 600,000 white, black, and Latino women with breast cancer. The study found that, after controlling for socio-economic status and health insurance coverage, differences in treatment remained.
Cancer rates are higher in white women, but African American women have a higher mortality from breast cancer.
Holder-Winfield lives in Newhallville (she’s married to State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield) and works with professionals in various fields to help them become aware of their biases and address them. She said she became motivated to look into health care disparities after her grandmother — a soft-spoken Jamaican woman — went to a doctor complaining of serious pain and was not taken seriously or treated respectfully.
“Cultural competency is not necessarily about overt racism or discrimination,” she said in a recent interview in her home. “Within health care, most likely you’re not going to have a physician or a nurse or a health care administrator call you a racial slur, an ethnic slur, a religious slur. But when you look at the decisions they make about your treatment or how they treat you, you do have to question, Would this person have made this recommendation if I were a different race, color, ethnicity, national origin?”
Holder-Winfield said improving the emotional intelligence of providers is key to reducing disparities. “Emotional intelligence is the ability to manage your emotions,” she said, “as well as managing relationships around you. It’s the ability to effectively lead by way of being able to pick up on social cues and being able to also pick up on your own internal cues.”
She said the fallout from patients not feeling welcomed or respected is that they don’t trust their medical providers and will be less likely to follow their recommendations, “and even worse, they’re not going to return for a follow-up visit.” Patient care can suffer, possibly leading to the outcomes the study found, although researchers note that more studies must be done to determine causation.
Holder-Winfield applauded the fact that the issue of racial disparities has gotten a lot of attention in the state’s medical community.
“However, after I had the unfortunate experience with my grandmother, I thought, let’s drill down a little deeper,” she said. “Even if we do have all these outreach efforts, the question is, How are our medical institutions really creating an environment that’s inclusive of people of all backgrounds?”
She found that as of Oct. 1, all doctors in Connecticut need at least one hour of cultural competency training. That led her to organize the upcoming training. Visit her website to register.