Health secretary orders racial bias review after Covid deaths
The health secretary has begun a review into racial bias in medical equipment amid fears that thousands of ethnic-minority patients died of Covid-19 who should have survived.
Sajid Javid is working with his American counterpart, Xavier Becerra, on introducing new international standards to ensure that medical devices have been tested on all races before they are allowed to be sold.
He has commissioned the review after research showed that oximeters, which monitor oxygen levels in the blood and are used to assess whether Covid-19 patients need lifesaving treatment, are less accurate on people with darker skin.
Analysis of data from Public Health England showed that deaths from coronavirus among people from ethnic-minority groups were two to four times greater than those among the white population in England, according to a paper in The Lancet.
Like so many people I watched with horror last week the brave testimony of the cricketers who came forward to speak about their experiences of discrimination while playing the sport they loved.
These stories struck a chord with me. The same word that was so ludicrously dismissed as banter between team-mates was used against me often when I grew up — and I can assure you, it’s not banter, it hurts. Although attitudes have thankfully changed a lot since then, there are still too many people in this country who find the odds unfairly stacked against them.
When I walk to my office, there’s a board showing everyone who’s held this role for over a century, and being the first name on that list from an ethnic minority is a responsibility I take very seriously.
I’m determined to take a fresh perspective to this position, and do whatever it takes so that in this country, your health and your experience of health and care isn’t dictated by where you live or where you come from.
Because although we’ve come together as a nation to fight this virus, the pandemic has shown that in many areas we’re far apart. At the height of the Covid peak last winter, black, Asian and other minority ethnic groups made up 28 per cent of critical-care admissions in England — about double their representation in the population as a whole. So one of my first visits in this role was to Blackpool, one of the parts of this country where life expectancy is in decline. I spoke about the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, an organisation that was launched last month and has so much potential to tackle these injustices.
I want to fix these disparities wherever I find them. For instance, a report last week highlighted how sickle cell patients, who are primarily from an African or Caribbean background, “too often receive sub-standard care”.
As well as this, I want to make sure that the benefits of the incredible advances in technology and treatments we’ve seen in recent years are widely shared, so they help not hinder this work.
It is easy to look at a machine and assume that everyone’s getting the same experience. But technologies are created and developed by people, and so bias, however inadvertent, can be an issue here too. So questions like who is writing the code, how a product is tested and who is sitting round the boardroom table are critical — especially when it comes to our health.
For example, research has shown that oximeters, which monitor oxygen levels and are used to see whether treatment is needed for Covid-19, are less accurate on people with darker skin. One of the founding principles of our NHS is equality, and the possibility that a bias — even an inadvertent one — could lead to a poorer health outcome is totally unacceptable.
The pandemic has brought this issue to the fore, but the issue of bias within medical devices has been ducked for far too long. Although we have very high standards for these technologies in this country — and people should keep coming forward for the treatment they need — we urgently need to know more about the bias in these devices, and what impact it is having on the front line.
So I have commissioned an independent review, looking at whether systematic bias exists within current devices, and if so, how we can address it.
The review will look at all medical devices, and other important biases such as gender bias. For example how we can ensure lifesaving technologies such as MRI scanners can be made accessible to pregnant or breastfeeding women.
We no longer have to follow EU regulations for how these devices are set up, and so we have the opportunity to chart our own course and drive change across the world.
I have been discussing this issue with Xavier Becerra, my counterpart in the US, and the first Latino to take on the role. I want to work with him and other like-minded nations around the world so we can shape what sits behind these valuable technologies.
Because one of the greatest gifts that you can give anyone is the gift of good health. I’ll make it my mission to close the chasms that the pandemic has exposed, to make us not just a healthier country, but a fairer one too.