Dental/dental hygiene trainees discuss social determinants of health, trust, and bias. (2023)
One of my first patients I ever worked with, I was a very new clinician. He is HIV positive, he’s disabled, so he’s not working. He had a lot of background characteristics that were not things that I had dealt with before, not things I had to talk about before… Brand new, so not only was I new to the dentistry, but I was new at talking about those concepts. So, having to ask questions about an HIV diagnosis to familiarize myself with that. Talking about getting medical consultations, all of that. So, definitely that was not something I felt I had, had too much familiarity with. So I’d say probably questions that were going through my head were, “How can I ask this without offending him.” Someone who has a lot of distrust in the healthcare system, that he made pretty clear to me, because of all the stigma around HIV.
And he had several situations that happened at hospitals with nurses, with other healthcare providers, that he had just such awful experiences, that I don’t even know that I could handle if I… I would never go back to the hospital again if I had those experiences that he had. So, definitely trying to say, “How can I get him to trust me? Get him to trust my judgment, my abilities to take care of him? Build a relationship with him, so I take the best care of his teeth, while also not invalidating those experiences of his.” Still having him understand that I understand them, and he can expect to not get that from me. That was definitely something new to me that I tried my best with. Thankfully he had a wonderful personality, where he was very understanding, and he knew that there were certain things that I… I mean, definitely messed up and said, “Oh, so what do you do?” And he was like, “Oh, I’m disabled, I don’t work.” So I was like, “Okay, maybe next time don’t ask the question that way.” So, it’s just certain things that teach you maybe more how to have those interactions with patients, and do them in a way where you’re not imposing your own beliefs, or backgrounds on someone who’s different from you.