Sajid Javid orders review into racial bias in medical devices after Covid deaths
More Covid patients from ethnic minority backgrounds may have died during the pandemic because of ‘racial bias in medical equipment.’
The health secretary Sajid Javid has ordered a review after it was found oximeters – used to measure blood oxygen levels – may be less accurate in darker skinned patients.
It means that doctors could have considered black or Asian patients to have had safe oxygen levels when in fact they were dangerously low – leading to potentially life-saving treatments being delayed as a result.
Mr Javid’s review will look into possible racial and gender bias in medical devices as he vowed to ‘close the chasms that the pandemic has exposed’.
The minister said it is ‘totally unacceptable’ that even an inadvertent bias could lead to a poorer health outcome for some people.
He said he is ‘determined to take a fresh perspective’ to his role within Government and ‘do whatever it takes’ to fix disparities, citing the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on black, Asian and other minority ethnic groups.
Writing in The Sunday Times, he said: ‘I want to make sure that the benefits of the incredible advances in technology and treatments we’ve seen in recent years are widely shared, so they help not hinder this work.
‘It is easy to look at a machine and assume that everyone’s getting the same experience. But technologies are created and developed by people, and so bias, however inadvertent, can be an issue here too.
‘So questions like who is writing the code, how a product is tested and who is sitting round the boardroom table are critical — especially when it comes to our health.’
A paper published in The Lancet medical journal showed that deaths from Covid among people from ethnic-minority groups were two to four times greater than those among the white population in England.
Many factors are thought to have played a role including deprivation and the high number of cases of diseases such as diabetes among certain ethnic groups.
But it is now thought that biases in medical equipment may also be partly to blame.
Oximeters are used routinely in hospitals and GP surgeries across Britain. They are attached to the end of a finger and work by measuring how much light is absorbed by the tissue. But dark skin absorbs more light than light skin, potentially skewing the results.
Speaking about his review on Sky News, Mr Javid said: ‘If you were from a BME background, a third of admissions were from (a) BME background in ICU units at the height of the crisis, and that’s more than double the representation of the population.’
He said it was already known that oximeters may give false readings for some patients but ‘no one did anything about it.’
He added: ‘I’m not saying this was deliberate by anyone, I think it’s just it’s a systemic issue potentially, with medical devices and it may go even further than that with medical textbooks, for example.’
The health secretary is working with his American counterpart, Xavier Becerra, as the racial bias in medical instruments is a ‘global problem.’
Mr Javid stressed non-white people could trust the NHS, but it was important to see what more could be done.
He said the independent review he has started will also look at ‘other important biases such as gender bias’, in considering such things as ensuring ‘lifesaving technologies such as MRI scanners can be made accessible to pregnant or breastfeeding women’.
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