The research work is aimed to examine the influence of healthcare providers’ knowledge, behavior, and attitudes on the reduction of racial and ethnic disparities. The research work includes three independent variables and one dependent variable. A dependent variable is a number of healthcare disparities, while the independent variables are the knowledge, behavior, and attitude of healthcare workers. Extraneous variables are the factors that have an influence on the result of the experiment but are not independent variables (Kaku et al., 2020). In this particular study, extraneous variables are healthcare professionals’ educational background, age, ethnic and racial belongings.
The education of the healthcare worker is significant in his future performance as an employee. Also, the educational background could affect the readiness of healthcare workers to communicate with racial and ethnic minorities. The age of the healthcare provider is also an important variable. People of different ages have different mentality and vision of the world. Thus, healthcare workers of different ages might differently treat the patience belonging to ethnic and racial minorities. Moreover, younger people usually are more open and easily educated compared to older people. Also, if the healthcare worker is of an ethnic and racial minority, the attitude towards other minorities would be different due to the worker’s own personal experience. A possible solution to control the effect of extraneous variables is to create a control group, which was randomly assigned from the participants’ pool. The effect of extraneous variables could be statistically eliminated by comparing the control group results with the experimental group’s results.
The instruments that are used for the data collection in this research study are the surveys, including the preliminary survey, the main survey, and the Attitudes to Patient Safety Questionnaire (APSQ-III) survey. A high score on the APSQ-III survey is an indication of a good attitude towards patient safety (Cantero-López et al., 2021). The validity and reliability of the data collected were assured by the screening of the participants. The participants were selected and screened based on the survey containing the question related to employment duration, interaction with patients, and interaction with ethnic and racial minorities. Only individuals with experience of more than two years and those who have direct communication with patients were chosen for further experimental procedures.
Moreover, for my own instruments, it would be useful to include the analysis of content validity. Several experts in the field should assess the questionary’s items for their proper relation to the aim of the research work. As the result of the content validity, some items of the questionary should be excluded, while some items should be agreed to remain for further work. In addition, another way to increase the validity of the questionary is by decreasing its demand characteristics. The demand characteristics are the items of the questionary that reveals the aim of the study. The reason is that some participants can be biased when they know the goal of the study. Minimum information about the research purpose will eliminate biased outcomes of the study.
In this study, the intervention is aimed to decrease the disparities based on racial or ethnic and racial origins of the clients. The hypothesis is that disparities can be decreased by enhancing the healthcare workers’ knowledge about proper behavior and attitude towards ethnic and racial minorities. The data collection procedures were divided into several steps. First, individuals who are interested in participating were screened based on the experience and interaction with clients. Then, the statistics regarding the disparity cases in the hospital were gathered. After, relevant information about the workers’ knowledge regarding the behavior and attitudes towards patients was collected via questionaries. Then, the same questionary was applied after participants took educational courses related to the enhancement of the relevant knowledge.
References
Cantero-López, N., González-Chordá, V. M., Valero-Chillerón, M. J., Mena-Tudela, D., Andreu-Pejó, L., Vila-Candel, R., & Cervera-Gasch, Á. (2021). Attitudes of Undergraduate Nursing Students towards Patient Safety: A Quasi-Experimental Study. International journal of environmental research and public health, 18(4), 1429.
Kaku, A., Mohan, S., Parnandi, A., Schambra, H., & Fernandez-Granda, C. (2020). Be like water: Robustness to extraneous variables via adaptive feature normalization. arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.04019.