Surgeons in New Zealand must now consider ethnicity in prioritising patients for operations
Surgeons in New Zealand must now consider ethnicity in prioritising patients for operations
Health officials said it was an important step in reducing historical health inequities.
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Its interesting that some doctors are outraged at this policy but not the fact that indigenous people on new Zeeland had been getting consistently worse medical outcomes since forever. That was apparently fine.
The solution to inequality is not more inequality.
I mean, that's what makes the most sense logically, but if the statistics actually show that it reduces inequality by implementing the system like this, I guess it's good? My initial reaction is negative, but their argument kind of makes sense: certain ethnicities receive poorer treatment earlier on, leading to worse outcomes requiring more surgery, so they should be operated on first.
Obviously the best solution would be to remove the inequality in the other parts of the system, but that's hard to do. The article says that they tested this system on a small scale first and saw that it successfully reduced inequality, hence why they're rolling it out on a larger scale. If that's true, then I would support it, so long as they were also trying to reduce the inequality already built into the system. But, I would also want to see what their criteria for determining inequality is, and what statistics they actually collected first.
What a stupid comment.
If you’re handing out Oreos to ten people and nine of them have 1 Oreo each and the final person has 200,000,000,000 Oreos there would be nothing equal in giving all ten people the same amount of food.
So yes, sometimes to equalize things out you need to practice a form of EQUITY over equality to get things truly closer to the equal you claim to desire.
And what happens when an 11th person shows up and you tell them they get less Oreos because they have the wrong skin color? Do they not deserve an equal share? Do they not deserve the same priority of medical care other skin colors receive?
We’re counting Oreos to represent inequity vs equality, not inventing straw men to be racist.
Imagine there is a line for Oreos every day and everyday you need to show up to get your Oreos. Now imagine there are certain people that outside the Oreo people control, live an hour further away and everyone starts at the same time. The people living an hour away will always be an hour later than the rest and be last in line. If the Oreos run out it will always affect the 1 hour late people because they are last. To fix this the Oreo people simply put them in line as if they arrived an hour earlier than they did because they technically were in line while travelling. The best way to fix it is to make sure that everyone has the same travel time but the Oreo distributor can't start moving people around or build new Oreo distribution places because that is outside their area. They just distribute Oreos and do their best to make it fair until the house distributors make things fair for real.
The Oreo people could have put them in line based on when they started traveling. That would have been fair.
But they didn't. They decided to let people cut the queue based on how far away they live.
Here's the problem: Some people live further away but right next to a high speed rail station. Other people live close but have to take a massive detour to cross a river.
Ok, I see there are some reading comprehension problems when it comes to metaphors. The distance I am talking about isn't literally distance. It is about how good their access to healthcare in general is. Maori is statistically proven to have worse outcomes when they are ill. They have to wait longer, gets their symptoms underestimated, get worse aftercare and ultimately die more often than other ethnicities with the exact same diagnosis. What they did was that they added a boost in priority that means that Maori that would normally wait a year for surgery now have to wait 10 months because we know that there is a bunch of shit that isn't medical that added those 2 months to begin with. The reason they chose to do it this way is because they tried it locally first and found that Maori suddenly got the same stats as everyone else when they did it.
The inequality is worse medical outcomes for indigenous people and this strategy has proven to equalize the outcomes for everyone involved. That means more equality not less. Recognizing that racism exist and implementing change based on that racism isn't itself racism.