Surgeons in New Zealand must now consider ethnicity in prioritising patients for operations
Surgeons in New Zealand must now consider ethnicity in prioritising patients for operations
www.nzherald.co.nz
Auckland surgeons must now consider ethnicity in prioritising patients for operations
Its interesting that some doctors are outraged at this policy but not the fact that indigenous people on new Zeeland had been getting consistently worse medical outcomes since forever. That was apparently fine.
I mean, that's what makes the most sense logically, but if the statistics actually show that it reduces inequality by implementing the system like this, I guess it's good? My initial reaction is negative, but their argument kind of makes sense: certain ethnicities receive poorer treatment earlier on, leading to worse outcomes requiring more surgery, so they should be operated on first.
Obviously the best solution would be to remove the inequality in the other parts of the system, but that's hard to do. The article says that they tested this system on a small scale first and saw that it successfully reduced inequality, hence why they're rolling it out on a larger scale. If that's true, then I would support it, so long as they were also trying to reduce the inequality already built into the system. But, I would also want to see what their criteria for determining inequality is, and what statistics they actually collected first.
The inequality is worse medical outcomes for indigenous people and this strategy has proven to equalize the outcomes for everyone involved. That means more equality not less. Recognizing that racism exist and implementing change based on that racism isn't itself racism.
What a stupid comment.
If you’re handing out Oreos to ten people and nine of them have 1 Oreo each and the final person has 200,000,000,000 Oreos there would be nothing equal in giving all ten people the same amount of food.
So yes, sometimes to equalize things out you need to practice a form of EQUITY over equality to get things truly closer to the equal you claim to desire.