'Really worrisome': Survey suggests some Alberta doctors have anti-Indigenous biases

Two University of Calgary researchers weren’t surprised when their survey of Alberta doctors showed biases against Indigenous patients, but they were shocked by some of the comments.

Two University of Calgary researchers weren’t surprised when their survey of Alberta doctors showed biases against Indigenous patients, but they were shocked by some of the comments.

Pamela Roach and Shannon Ruzycki sent a survey in September 2020 to every licensed doctor in the province to determine their biases following high-profile deaths of Indigenous patients in Canada's health-care system.

"These types of comments demonstrate a fundamental lack of knowledge about what race is, what racism is like, what power is and what privilege is," Ruzycki said in an interview.

"I think that that's really, really worrisome … the social determinants of health are one of the most important factors in our patients' lives and how they heal."

One of the survey respondents — a white doctor — said he felt racism from Indigenous people, not the other way around.

"The most common sort of racism I have seen is an Indigenous person being racist in words and actions against white people. This is 100 times more common than the converse," the doctor wrote, according to a study about the survey published in the online peer-reviewed journal BMJ Open last month.

Ruzycki and Roach said in some cases, when people of privilege say they're experiencing racism, it comes from a lack of understanding the system of power.