Ending the Practice of “Race Correction” in Lung Function Testing (PFT)
Ending the Practice of “Race Correction” in Health Care speaker series as part of the Li Ka Shing, Clinical and Population Research Rounds, 2022
Presented by Dr. Patricia O’Campo, Executive Director of the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at Unity Health Toronto, in partnership with the Canada-US Coalition to End Race Correction in Health Care and Knowledge Translation at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions.
Date and time of this virtual talk: Nov 18, 2022 from 12 pm – 1:30 pm EST
Register on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/ending-the-practice-of-race-correction-in-lung-function-testing-pft-tickets-450702271627
About this talk: Lung function tests (i.e. pulmonary function tests) are used to assess lung-related conditions such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Around the world, health care systems apply a “race correction” based on the false and racist assumption that Black people have lower lung function at baseline, for a variety of reasons. These false and racist ideas about Black people and lung function can be traced directly back to slave owners who used these ideas to advance white supremacy (Braun, 2014).
Race corrections are unscientific and done without the patient’s consent. As a result of the race correction applied to lung function tests, physicians are less likely to correctly diagnose Black patients with lung disease, and less likely to offer appropriate treatment. An examination of lung function tests performed at the University of Pennsylvania Health System between 2010 and 2020 discovered that, without race correction, diagnoses of lung disease in Black patients would have increased by 20 per cent (Moffett, Eneanya, Halpern & Weissman, 2021). The race correction applied to lung function tests also means that clinicians are less likely to refer Black people to necessary follow-up services, such as pulmonary therapy.
Dr. Lundy Braun, author of “Breath race into the machine: the surprising career of the spirometer from plantation to genetics” (2014) will address the history of how pulmonary function tests became so deeply racialized from the late 18th century to the present. Dr. Braun will emphasize the processes by which racism persists in race correction across health care systems.
What is “race correction”? Health care providers often use tests to assess a patient’s health. In many cases, health care providers calculate test results differently for Black patients than they do for everyone else. Overall, “race correction” means that Black people are diagnosed late, or never diagnosed at all, for serious conditions from heart, kidney and lung diseases to cognitive impairment. It also means that Black people are systematically excluded from timely access to life-saving treatments like organ transplants and other surgeries. “Race correction” has no scientific basis because “race” is not biological. It is a social construct that is applied differently in different times and in different places. In fact, scientists have shown us that people have more in common genetically across “racial” groups than within them.