This page covers useful resources and strategies for researching anti-racism in health care, including key terms, guidance on source use and searching, recommended databases and journals, and resources for full text finding.
The following is a list of useful terms related to anti-racism in health care. This is not a comprehensive list but may serve as a useful starting point for initial searches.
Anti-racis*; Antiracis*: Anti-racism or anti-racist refer to a range of practices related to combating racism. This term can be spelled with our without the dash, so consider including both in your search. Use the wildcard character, (anti-racis* OR antiracis*) to easily cover anti-racism/anti-racist and antiracism/antiracist in your search.
Cultural _____: The following terms refer to different but overlapping strategies for providing health care across cultural differences.
Cultural Competence/Competency: Cultural competency refers to understanding aspects of different cultures to provide a safer environment, better communication, and better care.
Culturally Responsive: Related to cultural competency, culturally responsive describes care or health care workers that respond to and support patients from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Cultural Humility/Culturally Humble: Cultural humility emphasizes awareness of one's own lack of knowledge and recognition that every individual has their own relationship with their culture. This approach recognizes that overconfidence in one's cultural competence may lead to stereotyping or close-mindedness.
Cultural Safety: Cultural safety, like cultural humility, emphasizes that cultural competence alone is not enough. Cultural safety calls on health care providers to reflect on their own positionality and prioritize the patient's perspective on how to create a culturally safe environment.
Health ____:
Health Equity: Health equity refers to a state where everyone's needs are met. The word "equity" is used instead of "equality" to emphasize that different patients have different needs, so treating everyone "equally" or the same would result in some patients not receiving the care they need. Equitable treatment requires learning about different patients' or populations' needs and putting in extra effort to address inequity.
Health Inequity: Refers broadly to the many factors impacting patients and populations receiving the care they need. Includes social determinates of health, structural inequity in health care settings, and impacts of personally mediated bias.
Health Justice: Refers to actions taken to create health equity. Often has a stronger focus on practice, activism, and politics than the phrase health equity.
Health Disparity: Similar to health inequity, this term has a stronger emphasis on places where needs aren't being met or on identifying where populations are more at risk for greater illness.
Racialized; Marginalized; Minoritized: Some literature uses these terms in favor of terms like racial minority to draw attention to the social construction of race and marginalization. You may find that these terms are less common, but you may miss some texts if you do not search for them.
Other Useful Search Terms:
While there are many useful academic sources on anti-racist health care, it is important to acknowledge that racialized populations are often excluded from or marginalized within academic research and publishing. Epistemic justice, or knowledge justice, calls on us to recognize other ways of producing knowledge and to actively seek out marginalized voices in our work.
While publication in a peer-reviewed journal is a useful indicator that a source is reliable, remember that knowledge production is contextual. That means depending on what kind of information you're looking for, other sources may also provide reliable information. For example, a blog post or opinion piece where a Black author discusses her experience with cancer treatment could be a reliable primary source if you are researching Black patient experiences with doctors, as the author is an expert on her own experiences.
When looking for sources on anti-racism in health care, depending on what kind of information you are focusing on, avoid limiting yourself to health science sources, or even to exclusively academic sources. The below are academic databases and journals that we give you access to through Gumberg library, but feel encouraged to look beyond what is available to you here.
For more information on search strategies in health science, visit our guide to searching health science literature.
