"Is your clinical encounter racially conscious?”. Bringing the racial debate into Family Practice

an experience report

Abstract

From the assumption of the myth of racial democracy, Primary Health Care, medicine, and especially Family Medicine has contributed to institutional racism in health. Those areas have been silencing racial health inequities. The impacts of racism in the health-illness process of the black population in Brazil have been invisible. This article presents the experience report of the construction and application of a workshop, entitled “Is your clinical encounter racially conscious?”. It aims to promote debate on the health of the black population among PHC professionals and medical students, in order to raise awareness on the ethnic/racial-relations and promote anti-racist care practice. With the workshop, it was possible to perceive the lack of knowledge of the participants on how to recognize and address situations of racism in the practice of PHC. As potentialities, the workshop has promoted awareness and critical reflection on the importance of addressing the ethnic/racial-relation aspect, has enabled the protagonism and representativeness of health professionals and black medical students in facilitating groups, has promoted institutional spaces for this theme to be debated, and also has trained new facilitators to stimulate the reproduction of the workshop in the most diverse national scenarios. As challenges, the lack of interest in the theme on the part of managers and institutions makes the approach to the theme uncertain and dependent on the will and commitment of one or the other individual. In addition, the workshop addresses multiple themes, but does not end the need to follow and deepen the discussion on the impacts of racism in the health of the Brazilian black population.