RaceCareEurope · Race-based health care: A comparative study of the use of race-based diagnostics in Europe

Race-based health care: A comparative study of the use of race-based diagnostics in Europe

The RaceCareEurope, was the first comparative multi-country investigation of the introduction and use of race-based health diagnostics in three different European countries. Inclusion and diversity are currently topical subjects in health research, care and policy in Europe. In recent years there have been calls at national and EU levels for health care professionals, health researchers and policymakers in Europe to attend to diversity and inclusion in health care, research and policy. Here, in addition to gender, migration, sex, religion, language, SES, education, and sexuality, ethnicity and race have become focus points within this so-called inclusion paradigm. With regard to race, one way in which inclusion and diversity has been approached in health care is to introduce race-based health diagnostics. These are diagnostic techniques, tools, calculations, and clinical diagnostic guidelines in which different actions are included for different ‘racial’ groups. ‘Race’ is, however, a highly contested social construct of which the use in research and medicine has been highly debated, especially in the United States the use of this social category as a flawed marker of biological difference has been problematized. Namely, when used in research and medicine this social construction becomes convoluted with alleged biological and genetic differences. From research conducted in the US2, we learn that an adverse broad societal consequence of using the concept of race in health care is that this reifies the idea that racial categories are biological. Furthermore, scholars point to adverse individual consequences for patients, such as being placed lower on organ transplant lists or receiving inadequate post-surgical pain treatment and care. Little was, and still is currently known about the use and consequences of race-based diagnostics in Europe, my own preliminary exploration of this topic in preparation for this proposal indicates that race-based health technologies and knowledge are imported from the US for use in Europe, and subsequently altered to use in the specific national context.RaceCareEurope sought to provide much needed theoretical and empirical understanding of the knowledge sources and scientific considerations driving the introduction and use of the concept of race in European health fields, and to provide for a much needed foundation to reflect and debate the use of the construct of race within the current diversity and inclusion paradigm in the field of health in Europe. The ultimate goal of the RaceCareEurope project was to understand how race-based diagnostics are currently being used in Europe, and what the individual and societal consequences are. Currently little is known about the use of race-based diagnostics in Europe. Both spirometry and the GFR-estimation are diagnostics used widely in everyday general practices by GPs to determine lung function and kidney function respectively (other race-based diagnostics are much more disease or risk-group specific and used less frequently and less wide-spread). For these reasons, within the proposed RaceCareEurope project the use of these two frequently used race-based diagnostics, namely spirometry and the eGFR equations, will be studied in the three European countries where they are frequently used, namely Belgium, the Netherlands, and France.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union