Equity vs. Equality: Why Same Isn’t Always Fair

Medical students and doctors with an ethnic-cultural minority background still face prejudices and cultural misunderstandings during their training. This affects their assessment, their chances of getting a training place and ultimately their career. But the problem does not only affect them, emphasizes pediatrician and trainer Charlie Obihara. “It also affects the quality of care for patients from minority groups. If the training does not move with an increasingly diverse society, you run the risk that your care is inadequate.”

Obihara, who is originally from Nigeria and has been working in the Netherlands for years, wrote the book together with his wife and psychologist Dorian Maarse Towards an inclusive education in healthcare. Using eleven practical cases, they show how unconscious cultural assumptions and stereotyping influence assessment, selection and cooperation. “The intention is almost always good,” he says. “But there are unconscious factors at play: stereotypes, assumptions about behavior, cultural misunderstandings. And these can have major consequences.”

“These are no longer opinions, they are patterns”

Pediatrician and educator Charlie Obihara

Unequal opportunities in numbers

Research also shows that these consequences are real. Obihara points to recent studies showing that students with a migration background and other minority groups are less likely to progress to a training place. “At the beginning of the gen