Disparities in Physician Care: Experiences and Perceptions of a Multi-Ethnic America

From Health Affairs The Harvard/RWJF Survey. This paper reports the results from a 2007 Harvard School of Public Health/RobertWood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) national survey of fourteen minority ethnic subgroups' perceptions of the quality of their physician care. This study fills a gap in the literature by providing current evidence for differences in perceived quality of physician care for each of these groups compared to whites. This multi-ethnic focus is important because, when discussing perceptions of health care quality, prior research has tended to look at the major ethnic groups (African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans) as homogenous groupings, even though group members are from different countries, cultures, and language backgrounds. Also, most prior studies have not examined the experiences of American Indians/Alaska Natives. There is reason to believe that members of these subgroups may have different health care experiences than other members of their ethnic groups. For example, Hispanic subgroups have been found to differ across multiple health outcomes, such as low birthweight, rates of premature birth, and mortality; African Americans of different backgrounds have been shown to have varying health outcomes; and Vietnamese Americans describe more health problems than other Asian Americans do, while Japanese Americans report fewer health problems than their fellow Asian Americans.