Understanding racism in healthcare: Developing and implementing anti-racist strategies through shared knowledge production and evaluation

Primary investigator: Professor Hannah Bradby (Department of Sociology, Uppsala University).

Other investigators: Professor Beth Ahlberg (Department of Sociology, Uppsala University) and Associate Professor Suruchi Thapar-Björket (Department of Government, Uppsala University).

Collaborator: Sarah Hamed (PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University).

Funding: The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet).

Duration: June 2017 - December 2020.

Project description: The project discusses racism in healthcare in Sweden with diverse groups of providers and patients with a view to finding a shared vocabulary and implementing anti-racist strategies. Using participatory methods of dialogue and shared learning with a range of stakeholders in the provision and uptake of healthcare, the project creates opportunities for antiracist strategies that represent a progressive change towards improved quality of care. Stakeholders will meet to discuss their own and others’ experiences in a non-judgmental setting and these ideas will be subject to inductive qualitative analysis before being fed back to them to develop an implementation framework.

The project has 4 phases:

1. Consulting participants, sampling and data collection;
2. Networking and collaboration;
3. Developing policy suggestions to undo both institutional and individual racism;
4. Implementation of the developed policy suggestions, all of which involve dialogue conferences and consultation workshops to ensure widely informed discussion.

Publications:

Bradby, Hannah, Thapar-Björkert, Suruchi, Hamed, Sarah & Ahlberg, Beth Maina, "Undoing the unspeakable: researching racism in Swedish healthcare using a participatory process to build dialogue", Health Research Policy and Systems, volume 17, 43, 2019.

Ahlberg, B. M; Hamed, S; Bradby, H; Moberg, C. and Thapar-Bjorkert, S. (2021). “Just throw it behind you and just keep going”: Emotional labor when ethnic minority... Frontiers in Sociolology,  Medical Sociology, DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2021.741202

Hamed, S; Thapar-Björkert, S; Bradby, H. and Ahlberg, B. M. (2020). ‘Racism in European Health Care: Structural Violence and Beyond’. Qualitative Health Research.

Bradby, H; Hamed, S; Thapar Björkert, S. and Ahlberg, B. M. (2021) Designing an education intervention for understanding racism in healthcare in Sweden: development and implementation of anti-racist strategies through shared knowledge production and evaluation. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 1–4.

Ahlberg, B.M., Hamed, S., Thapar-Björkert, S., Bradby, H. (2019). ‘Invisibility of Racism in the Global Neoliberal Era: Implications for Researching Racism in Healthcare’. Frontiers in Sociology.

Hamed, S., Bradby, H., Ahlberg, B. M., & Thapar-Björkert, S. (2022). Racism in healthcare: A scoping review. BMC Public Health, 22(1), 988. 

Bradby, H., Thapar-Björkert, S., Hamed, S., & Ahlberg, B. M. (2022). ‘You are Still a Guest in This Country!’: Understanding Racism through the Concepts of Hospitality and Hostility in Healthcare Encounters in Sweden. Sociology, 00380385221124827.