Efforts to describe, analyse and improve population health have to cope with the frustrating finding that some groups often turn out to have much poorer health status than others, and may also have lower access to health-enhancing resources. These vulnerable groups may be identified along several dimensions such as socio-economic status, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability or age: different health problems have different vulnerable grouping. Health inequalities is the domain of research describing and analysing such health differences while Law and Ethics provide frameworks to assess the extent to which such inequalities are deemed unfair and how to address them.
Interethnic medical consultation. Understand the genesis of inequalities in healthcare for ethnic groups in order to address health inequalities that they face. One objective is to provide a conceptual frame leading us to a better understanding of the ways in which interethnic medical consultation could influence medical doctors’ daily practice. More precisely, we focus on individual, interactional, contextual determinants that affect doctors’ attitudes, stereotype, beliefs, emotions, decision-making, cooperation or partnership building during the medical interethnic consultation. The aim of our researches is to identify doctors’ underlying cognitive mechanisms leading to differential treatment (discrimination) of vulnerable patients and also to analyze the context in which they appear, or are potentiated. We are convinced that benefits of our researches are relevant for all patients, but also for medical students and experienced doctors, concerned to practice in the best equitable way.
Ongoing projects in bioethics: HELESI Biomedical center