Interview with Minority Patient Care Expert: Manith Thaing

In order to get a better idea of minority patient care, I interviewed Manith Thaing. She is a registered nurse and program coordinator at Asian Health Services. Being a nurse, she regularly works with minority patients at her clinical site. At a healthcare facility like Asian Health Services, this clinic primarily serves low-socioeconomic Asian and minority community who lacks health insurance. She works closely with other nurses and doctors in serving low-income minority patients. As a program coordinator at Asian Health Services, she works closely with these patients to ensure they are receiving the best possible health care. She has years of experience working with minority patients at this clinic.

Interview Questions & Responses:

Why is it difficult for minority patients to get quality healthcare?
It is difficult for minority patients to get quality healthcare because of cultural and language barriers. Language barrier is one of the main problems that cause minorities to not be able to access quality care.

How can we help minorities get quality healthcare?
- Hire interpreters, people who patients are comfortable with and people who they can relate to (i.e. family members)
- People who can understand where the patient is coming from (i.e. same culture, grew up together)
- Providers/nurses who speak the same language (for easier communication)

What are the barriers for minorities to access better quality healthcare?
- Language barriers
- Access to transportation
- Access to technology (phone calls, internet/websites)
- Lack of access to information (brochures, leaflets), being able to understand them because of low literacy rates, not being empowered enough
- Feeling intimidated on how to access care

How are minority patients treated compared to other patients with the same health insurance?
Minorities are not given same opportunities/access because of their low socioeconomic status. For people who has access to resources, they can go online and find their provider/information on health issues. However, low-income people usually can't access a computer due to limited access for these resources, so they are out of luck.

Why are minorities more likely to suffer from different illnesses and diseases compared to Whites?
- Because they're not provided information that this can happen to them
- Not translated to different languages
- Low educational status, hard to comprehend illnesses
- Low levels of prevention, lack of understanding prevention. Not enough health education programs out there

Are healthcare providers biased towards minority patients? Explain.
At Asian Health Services, healthcare providers are not biased towards minority patients. They understand the cuture; they have interpreters; they have health coaches to teach patients to advocate and empower themselves on their personal health.

Do you think that our healthcare system is discriminating against minority patients? Explain.
Yes, low-income families tend to go to county hospitals, and county hospitals are understaffed with long wait times. Patients have to wait hours to receive care. For example, a youth who walks in with baggy pants gets labeled as a gang member and healthcare workers may feel threatened/hesitant to want to work with that specific patient due to personal biases learned from the society.

What problems are minorities facing as a result of disparities in minority healthcare?
Minorities wait until it's too late before they come in to see a doctor because of lack of education and lack of access to care.

What possible solutions are there to improve minority healthcare?
In order to improve minority healthcare, there should be more cultural competent providers and more community health education. This will greatly benefit the minority population in accessing better healthcare.

What does the future hold for minority patients and our healthcare system?
For our future healthcare system, the Affordable Act or Obamacare is a newly signed law to increase the quality and affordability of health insurance for everyone. This allows the minority population to take advantage of this new resource and it gives everyone an opportunity for having health insurance.

Summary:
In my interview with Manith, she stated that minorities are faced with barriers, social discrimination and lack of resources to acquire quality care. From her experience of working with minority patients, she believes that minorities are not given the same opportunities/access to quality care because of their lower socioeconomic status. Their lower SES decreases their chances of getting quality healthcare, even with same health insurance as other patients. Regardless of income status, educational background and same health insurance as others, they are at a disadvantage. In order to improve minority healthcare, Manith stated that having people who speak the same language (i.e. family member, provider, nurses) will help minorities in receiving quality healthcare. She believed that communication is key to building a strong relationship between the patient and provider, so having interpreters and healthcare staff who speak the same language as the patient is recommended.

Analysis:
Manith's experience with minority patients provide good background of real life minority patient care at a clinical site. Her experiences with minority patients at Asian Health Services primarily serves low-socioeconomic Asian community with lack of health insurance. Because she mostly treats minority patients of Asian descant, the information provided is solely based on only one group in the minority poplation. This interview disregards the other minority groups- Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, etc. Despite this, all the information provided through the interview gave good information on supporting how minority healthcare is like at this clinic. Overall, we get the image that minorities are lacking support to get quality care and her conclusions support most research out there.

Response:
I agree with Manith's perspective on minority healthcare and I believe that her interview is credible. Minorities are not given the same opportunities because they don't have the resources, the income, the knowledge of the information provided to them, and the language to effectively communicate with healthcare providers and staff. They suffer from their low SES and fail to get quality healthcare mostly due to lack of health insurance. They are forced to choose receiving care at county hospitals where those sites are understaffed, leading to long wait times. I've experiened these same assumptions with my own family. I do believe that they tend to place minority patients as the lowest priority for receiving care because they usually don't have health insurance or don't view their health issues as severe enough for immediate care. This results in inequality in the healthcare system.