In the healthcare field, there are a lot of professionals who may have been biased towards their patients in one way or another. Bias, in most cases, interferes with the quality of healthcare services provided to patients by healthcare professionals. A family nurse practitioner is the most affected by bias because they are constantly interacting with their patients on a one-on-one basis. It is therefore important for family nurse practitioners to learn the various ways through which they can deal with the situation. In most cases, dealing with bias requires one first to recognize its presence strategize on how to change their practice (FitzGerald & Hurst, 2017 ) . It is therefore important to analyze the types of biases that are more likely to occur to family nurse practitioners, how they affect the nurses and the various ways that can be used to reduce them.
Biases have the potential of affecting the outcomes of a nurse’s practice. Both implicit and explicit bias affects the type of treatment offered to patients. Bias can make a family nurse practitioner provide poor care to some of their patients compared to others with the same health conditions (Blair, Steiner & Havranek, 2011). Furthermore, bias can occur towards patients suffering certain types of illnesses and disorders that cause societal stigmas to their patients. Biases towards patients suffering from such disorders make it difficult for them to recover from their illnesses. For example, if a patient who has HIV and AIDS is discriminated upon by a health practitioner, they find it hard to accept their situation and undergo medication as required by them (Blair, Steiner & Havranek, 2011 ) . From the analysis of biases done by nursing practitioners, it is important that they take time to re-evaluate themselves and change their practices to offer better services to their patients.
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There are several personal biases towards people depending on their traits. Own biases towards patients can occur when white physicians easily prescribe pain medication to white patients compared to black patients. Furthermore, white physicians, in most cases, assume that black patients, especially from low-income areas, are less intelligence and they may not follow medical advice ( Hurst & FitzGerald, 2017) . Further, according to Hurst & FitzGerald (2017), t here are also instances where pregnant women are discriminated upon based on their socioeconomic background and ethnicity. Some of the medical practitioners offer poor quality services to patients from low-income areas compared to those from well-off families. The examples provided demonstrate how biases are common in the healthcare sector and the urgency needed in resolving the issue.
Being a family nurse practitioner, there are several biases that I have. The most common, however, is the bias that I show when handling patients from low-income areas. In most cases, I assume that patients from poor backgrounds are impolite and sometimes rude. This makes it hard to offer excellent services to them. Over time, I have realized that the bias that I have towards my patients affects the quality of services that I offer, prompting me to come up with several strategies that can help in being fair to all my patients.
With the type of bias that I have, it is essential that I come up with a strategy that may help in reducing it. According to Patricia and Lori (2016), the most effective strategy is first to recognize and accept that I have the specific bias and then start the process of reducing it by changing my perception towards patients and treating all of them equally. As a family nurse practitioner, there are several biases that I am most likely to have towards my patients. It is therefore important to identify the specific biases that I have and come up with effective strategies that I will employorder to reduce them.
References
Blair, I. V., Steiner, J. F., & Havranek, E. P. (2011). Unconscious (Implicit) Bias and Health Disparities: Where Do We Go from Here? Perm J , 15(2), 71–78. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3140753/
FitzGerald, C., & Hurst, S. (2017). Implicit bias in healthcare professionals: A systematic review. BMC Med Ethics , 18(19). doi: 10.1186/s12910-017-0179-8
Patricia, B., & Lori, Z. (2016). Five strategies to combat unconscious bias. Nursing2019 , 46(11), 61-62. Retrieved from https://www.nursingcenter.com/journalarticle?Article_ID=3832944&Journal_ID=54016&Issue_ID=3832735
