Black newborn babies in the United States are more likely to survive childbirth when cared for by black doctors compared to white doctors. A new study finds.
According to George Mason University research, the mortality rate of black newborns shrunk by between 39% and 58% when black physicians took charge of the newborns.
However, the death rate for white babies was largely unaffected by the doctor's race.
This was published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
"The findings suggest that black physicians overtake their white colleagues when caring for black newborns." The study authors wrote.
'For families giving birth to a black baby, the desire to minimize risk and seek care from a black physician would be understandable,' they added.
According to the authors, reducing racial disparities in newborn mortality will require raising awareness among all doctors and hospital administrators about the prevalence of racial and ethnic disparities.
Multiple interrelated factors that contribute to these disparities might include structural and societal racism, toxic stress, and cumulative socioeconomic disadvantages.
Unconscious racism among white doctors towards black women and their babies may also be at play.
For white newborns, the race of their doctor makes little difference to their chances of survival.
Regardless of the mother’s income or education level, black babies are more than twice as likely to die before reaching their first birthday than white babies. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published last year.
Far more babies are born in poor health in the US than in the UK or Scandinavian countries, making their survival even an odd lower from their first breaths.
Researchers reviewed 1.8m hospital birth records in Florida from 1992 to 2015, black newborns were about three times more likely to die in the hospital than white newborns.
At baseline, 1,090 out of every 100,000 black babies born died within the first 28 days of life.
That was more than twice the death rate among white babies: 490 per 100,000.
And in 2018 the most recent year for which there is complete data, 3.5 out of every 1,000 babies born died within 28 days of birth. That year, 21,467 newborns died.
Birth weight is also a key indicator of a baby's health, and black babies are far more likely to be born underweight compared to white babies.
Between 2016 and 2018, 13.3 per cent of black newborns had low birth weights.
Despite the discoveries, black women seeking a black doctor to minimize the risk to their babies will struggle as the medical workforce remains disproportionately white.
Majority of doctors in the US are white and only 5% are black, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. This intensifies the challenge of improving care for black infants in the US.
Therefore, physician performance is wildly inconsistent, meaning that selecting a doctor based on race alone would not be enough to ensure a newborn's survival.
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