Implications of systemic racism in emergency medical services: On prehospital bias and complicity.

Abstract

Public health research has increasingly proven racial disparities within emergency medicine, as exemplified by the fallibility of pulse oximeters resulting in unreliable detection of respiratory compromise, to implicitly biased clinical perception of pain in Black and Brown patients.1 There is a lack of literature detailing the complicity of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) clinicians who sit among a nation with an inequitable healthcare system. In this piece, we aim to shed light on how disparities in prehospital emergency medical care harm patients of color.