On Addressing Racial Disparities in Healthcare - HIMSS Europe Series with Steve Gilbert

When you think about healthcare and technology, technology can certainly help.But I think there are some enduring challenges around healthcare, especially around kind of where I live, around mental health care, which not even AI can solve at this point because actually we still are trying to understand the nature of mental illnesses, how they come to manifest. My name is Steve Gilbert. I'm part of the Patient Advisory Group for HIMSS.

Hello dear listeners, welcome to a new episode of our HIMSS Europe special series on Narratives of Purpose.This week I bring you interviews with three speakers of the H Women's Health in Focus track track from the session titled "Intersectional Innovation: Addressing Health Disparities".These interviews were recorded in Paris back in June at the HIMSS, the Healthcare Information and Management System Society European flagship event, also considered as Europe's number one digital health conference. For those of you listening to Narratives of Purpose for the first time, my name is Claire Murigande.I am your host on this podcast which is all about amplifying social impact by showcasing unique stories of global change makers who are contributing to make a difference in society. My guest today is Steve Gilbert.Steve is a speaker, consultant and coach with over a decade of experience leading work to tackle racism and improve outcomes for people living with mental illnesses.Steve is also the co-chair of the Mental Health Working Group, part of the NHS Race and Health Observatory Board where he supports work to better understand the social determinants of racial mental health inequalities. Remember to rate and review our show wherever you listen to your podcast or simply share your thoughts and feedback on the Narratives of Purpose website using the short link bit.ly/narrativesofpurpose then select the review page. For now, get comfortable and let's start the conversation with Steve.

My name is Steve Gilbert, I'm from Birmingham in the uk. I do a range of things. The main thing I do at the moment is around anti racism leadership coaching.So I've developing a number of approaches to really support leaders in the development of anti racism leaders. Really thinking about how it works in organisations, how it can be more systematic.But I have a long history of mental illness which is part of why I'm here. So I'm part of the Patient Advisory group for hims. As a person who lives with bipolar disorder and complex ptsd.I also identify as a suicide attempt survivor.So I've spent the last 10 years working at the intersection of more severe and enduring mental illnesses and that intersection specifically with race. We all go to a lot of conferences. There is a real community ethos here. We're here to hear from the speakers.We're here to kind of learn, but we're also genuinely here to connect and I think to embrace the fact that we don't know the answers as much as we do know the answers. I think that's really, really important.When you think about healthcare and technology, technology can certainly help, but I think there are some enduring challenges around healthcare, especially around kind of, you know, where I live, around mental healthcare, which not even AI can solve at this point because actually we still are trying to understand the nature of mental illnesses, how they come to manifest. You know, bipolar disorder isn't something you contract, but it also doesn't come from just anywhere.And to kind of be in a space where people go, I'm really good at this thing. But also do any of us really understand some of the complexities of what we're dealing with? And that for me is a, a really special thing about HIMSS.

You'll be part of the women's Health in focus track and I'm curious to understand how you're going to approach your talk because I can see some parallels because your session is going to be about having more diversity within healthcare, not only talking about sex and gender, but all the intersectionality of individuals. I can see some parallels with racism, but how are you going to approach this session?

I've got 10 minutes. So it's this real challenge and we have put a lot of thought into it and I am going to be an agitator.I think part of the concern more widely around the innovation space is that more needs to be done to support the development of women. But you can sometimes end up doing that and you can end up missing where the disparity lies.So for me that was where it was like, right, that's where the anti racism lens comes in. And I think the bit around the agitation for me is just asking questions.So we've got five questions, we're going to do them on slido and they're just, they're light agitation. So it's just kind of, have you thought about this? And then just to use that, 10 minutes to go. We need to move beyond the idea of being a good person.I think one of the things that really frustrates me is we like to go, we're, we're really good people, we're a good organization, blah, blah, blah, Good and bad does not exist. The only thing that exists is how you are attending to an issue. And I think the first part for me is, and I ask for honesty.How well do you think you're doing on this issue and to be vulnerable in that.And then, and then all of the questions are really geared around trying to understand or trying to kind of prompt someone to think, what is it that I can identify with, my influence I can do something about and then how well I measure what I'm doing. And I think we really struggle with trying to measure around things that are sit in the workplace but also sit in society.So the discrimination against black women in particular is not just in the workplace. It's heavily in society. Very concerned about how Simone Biles has been treated at the moment.When black women in particular are seen to have made a mistake, the consequences, even if you are a one of the greatest Olympians, it can be very severe. That doesn't happen if you're a white woman. So again, it's not just in the workplace, it's in society.It is affecting people, you know, irrespective of, you know, how much money they've got, how much fame, how much success success they've got. If you're a black woman and you make a mistake.So we see that, but then we kind of go, well, we can't really measure the impact of doing what you can. You have to think about how you're going to do it. And again, there is no measurement of how good you are. But there are.If you say, for example, we are going to, we're gonna, we're gonna fund mentoring opportunities, well, then you can. That's a metric. Which one of you you're putting towards that. How is that being received?And you know, you sit between kind of qualitative and quantitative. You know, you can, it just requires your effort and your attention.I think the bit that people don't like about that is when you start doing something, you are bad at it. So, you know, it's a bit like when I learned to drive. You know, as a kid I used to watch, you know, my father driving.I neared it and I jumped in a car and I was like, oh, I know how to drive. I couldn't drive. And I was gutted because I was like, how hard can it be? And that's the bit that leaders don't like.And actually the bit that I'm going to kind of lean into is try to feel some of that vulnerability here in a community like this and then go away thinking, right, I'm not the only one that doesn't know this.So a lot of my work, my anti racism work, work is about helping people to quickly get into their vulnerability to understand it to realize that they've overcome massive challenges before. If you are a leader in an organization you have overcome, it might not be to do with feminism, it might not be to do with racism. It might.But there is something you've had to overcome. Hold on to that and then let's develop from there.

I love that. I love this approach.

I think for me as an individual and because of the role I've adopted over the last 10, 11 years as a patient advocate, I have had to wear all of my, I wouldn't say failings. I have to talk about what went wrong in my life. There is nowhere to hide. There's nowhere for me to hide. And do you know what? The sky didn't fall in.It wasn't as bad. Nothing bad happened.Actually, I understand me better and because I'm open about the things in my life that I've struggled with, the way that it helps people to open up. Because again, we're also scared of kind of going, well, if I show any vulnerability, will people look at me differently?Yeah, they will, but maybe they will go, you're a human. So over the, over the 11 years that I've been involved in kind of the healthcare space, I.And I think what we do with businesses, what we do with healthcare is we love to talk about the solutions, we love to get this piece of software or this approach. And I think it's really easy to forget that all of that is a route to just being there for people. It doesn't matter what AI solution you've got.People are the same as they've been for millennia. If you do not communicate to them that they matter.If you do not communicate to them that first and foremost their feelings, physically, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically are important, there is no way they can function well in your organization. And for me, that that is everything. Everything else is just in service of that.

It's a good point you mentioned there because we had one of the conversations we recorded previously, one of the other speakers from the track, he is working as a gynecologist and he has developed a new innovative way to prevent and to help support endometriosis care for women. But he says it all comes down to one thing, which is asking the right question. And of course we can train the AI for that.But that's what you need from the beginning, is that connection, that trust and ask the right questions. Because. Because what you do in your work as a physician is only attending to the acute phase and relieving some symptoms.But if you want to go back and deal with the core of the issue and identify it early enough, then you have to ask the right question. So it comes back to, as you were saying, connection, right? You have the tech and the AI, but you still have to have this connection.

And there's something you said there around, it was a very important word, trust. Maybe at some point we will have robots that are so human like that they can replicate the life in a human eye. I don't know.But for me, that trust is to do with that conveying through all of what makes us human, facial expressions, the energy that we're putting out to that person, the attention. We've got this amazing AI system. It's going to, what would have taken us an hour, we can do in five minutes. But I need to connect with you first.And that's just true with healthcare as it is to when you go into a shop to go and buy a top, you want to feel that you're welcome there, you're going to buy a top. But I went into, you know, I was starting to need some new shirts and some shore. I went into. I just, it was so cold. It just felt so cold.And it's not, it's not important, but it just made me feel really rubbish.But we do that in healthcare and what we do a lot in healthcare is, is we go, we have the solution, but what we fail to understand, and this is a piece of advice that a mentor told me once was nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. And I think that that is never more important now than now when we've got, you know, AI can give us all the answers, but AI can't care. Your.Your solution cannot do the caring.So when I go back to the agitation, when I go back to the questions, it's not to be deliberately difficult, but it is to say, trust starts by being humble. Trust starts by being genuine.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

If you wish to follow Steve's activities, be sure to connect with him on LinkedIn and TwitterX @Steve Gilbert OBE. All the links are available in the episode Show Notes. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I appreciate you taking the time.Join me again next week for two new episodes of our HIMSS Europe Special series featuring speakers of the Women's Health track session titled "Beyond Bias: Redefining Chronic Condition Management". Until then, take care of yourselves, stay well and stay inspired.