What’s Up With That?: Race, ethnicity questions serve purposes

When I took my son to Southwest Washington Medical Center, the most important thing they wanted to know: Is he white, is he Hispanic, is he black, is he Samoan? It’s not just the hospital, it’s also child care and job applications. Why is it necessary for the government and everybody else to know what color everybody is? Is it really that important? Why does it matter?

— Marjorie Bates, Bagley Downs

The answer is accountability. We can’t achieve freedom from discrimination unless institutions behave accordingly. And we can’t know for sure unless we have data.

“It’s anti-discrimination,” said Mary Parson of the Burton Early Learning Center, a Head Start program. “We ask for racial identity mainly because this program is a state and federally funded program. The government is wanting to know who they’re serving. They want to know where the needs are and where their money is going.”

Parson added that both clients and employment applicants can leave the race space blank.

Same goes for the hospital. Steve Holt, patient registrar at Southwest Washington Medical Center, said, “unknown” and “patient refused” are always options on patient intake forms, and all intake staff should know it.

Holt said he finds the question personally distasteful — and, until recently, the hospital simply didn’t report its findings. But a couple of state agencies — the Health department and a commission for hospital accreditation — now require it. The information is “blinded” when reports are generated, Holt said, meaning that full names are not attached to racial statistics.

But the hospital does put the information to good in-house use, he added. There are medical conditions that affect some ethnicities more than others — for example, blacks are particularly susceptible to sickle-cell anemia and women of Vietnamese origin have a disproportionately high rate of cervical cancer, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The hospital also wants to know when it needs to provide for local populations that need language translation or belong to ethnic groups with customs and beliefs that affect the type of care provided.

“The idea behind it is to have as much information as possible that will affect the quality of our care giving,” Holt said.