About EDACS in the ED

Emergency care practitioners are not immune to implicit biases - the stereotypes, perceptions, and attitudes that have been acquired while living in a society that perpetuates and reinforces these beliefs. In Canada, these beliefs are also rooted in our colonial history and its impact on Indigenous Peoples and racialized populations. In the worst case, these biases can have fatal impacts, such as in the Brian Sinclair case, where the influences of systemic racism led staff to ignore Mr. Sinclair in an ED waiting room for a total of thirty-four hours, ending with his death. Other impacts of bias can be seen with anti-Black racism in the emergency department contributing to the routine undertreatment of pain, particularly in the context of sickle cell disease, which adds to distress and further distrust of the medical system by Black patients. Addressing these biases in the healthcare system requires active engagement, such as the implementation of strategies to become aware of structurally embedded inequities, including systemic racism, and their harms, and exposure to counter-stereotypical exemplars and transformative education and critical pedagogies targeted at healthcare providers. Emergency care providers may have differential access to training and skill-building in these areas, making an online platform an important avenue for information dissemination and training to improve patient care. 

 

To address ongoing deficits in the care of marginalized populations, healthcare planners and hospital administrators must alter the way that care is structured, and modify how ED services are provided. Increased recognition of patient perspective and experience is a necessary part of this, as is access to the best available quantitative and qualitative evidence, some of which may be housed outside of the traditional medical literature.