Finding Fairhealth through making Black Lives Matter

In this episode we talk to Dr Julie Duodu and Dr Lucy Carter. I can’t stress enough how incredible these two ladies are and what a pleasure it was to be (a small) part of their conversation. Julie is a GP in Leeds working at York Street practice, a large inner city practice in Leeds serving the homeless population. Lucy is a GP in the culturally diverse borough of Hackney in London.

As much as I try to make some of these episodes short and a quick listen, I can't do that for them all...This is a longer episode than usual, but I think you’ll understand why. We hope you enjoy hearing the experiences of these amazing women.

We kick off with Lucy and Julie filling us in with how they are both doing in this challenging time (3mins). We discuss the opportunity the events of recent months have given to talk more about race (6mins). We cover the challenges with talking about race (6mins) and becoming more comfortable with being uncomfortable (8mins). Julie and Lucy share a mutual feeling of being proud of their heritage but feeling a pressure to fit in (12m20s). We discuss how society’s attitudes have impacted on the journey to where they both are now as GPs (18m40s).

Lucy and Julie share their experiences of attitudes to race in the workplace (23mins 20s).We discuss being labelled as ‘the black doctor’ (27mins) and having to negotiate racism in their everyday work (29m30s). We go on to discuss the importance of good leadership in having a unified stance on anti-racism (34m 40s). We also talk about the importance of representation and diversity in leadership and how inspiring and impactful this can be early in a career and beyond (37mins)

I ask Lucy and Julie how race impacts on health inequalities amongst their patient population (39mins). We discuss COVID-19 and how race and ethnicity impacts their (40mins).

We discuss Lucy and Julie’s views on some of the solutions to dealing with race and health inequalities for our patients (46m 35s) including:

• Recognising that health inequalities exist and that race plays a huge part in this; 
• Opening up spaces in the workplace to explore biases;
• Decolonising medical curriculums, defaulting from the white standard;
• Increasing the diversity of race and ethnicity in leadership roles;
• Keeping the conversation about race going into the future (53m 10s);

As always we finish with further resources and magic genie wishes (60m).

Lucy’s resources

• Brit-ish: Race Identity and belonging by Afua Hirsch
• Robin DiAngela White Fragility: Why is is so hard for white people to talk about racism

Julie’s recourses

• Natives by Akala 
• Superior by Angela Saini 
• Colour brave rather than colour blind TEDTalk by Mellody Hobson  

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