Racism is difficult to discuss in the context of Swedish healthcare for various cultural and administrative reasons. Herein, we interpret the fragmentary nature of the evidence of racialising processes and the difficulty of reporting racist discrimination in terms of structural violence.
In response to the unspeakable nature of racism in Swedish healthcare, we propose a phased participatory process to build a common vocabulary and grammar through a consultative framework involving healthcare providers and service users as well as policy-makers. These stakeholders will be involved in an educational intervention to facilitate discussion around and avoidance of racism in service provision.
Both the participatory process and outcomes of the process, e.g. educational interventions, will contribute to the social and political conversation about racism in healthcare settings. Creating new ways of discussing sensitive topics allows ameliorative actions to be taken, benefitting healthcare providers and users. The urgency of the project is underlined.
The aim of this project is to create a discussion about racism in healthcare settings in Sweden, involving both healthcare providers and users, to inform and enable constructive interventions to reduce the damage of racism in healthcare interactions. This protocol sketches the limited evidence around racism in Swedish healthcare, frames it as a feature of structural violence and proposes a participatory intervention as crucial for beginning to address a long-standing institutionalised discrimination that damages patients, staff and the prospect of equal access to services.
Despite evidence of discrimination and inequality in health outcomes, racism is extraordinarily difficult to discuss in Swedish healthcare encounters. Therefore, the focus of our research is the fact that racism is apparent, yet unspeakable in the context of healthcare. We use the concept of structural violence to theoretically and empirically analyse how discrimination can be both widespread and hard to apprehend. This protocol takes healthcare as a context for structural violence and proposes a collaborative method to render racism a subject of discussion, thereby making it possible to cooperatively tackle racism by health service users and providers.
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