Should patients be able to specify the race of health staff?

Graham Adams writes:

The news early this month that a Pakeha patient asked not to be treated by Asian staff at Auckland’s North Shore Hospital and that the hospital complied was quickly and roundly condemned by the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists and health-worker unions. Many of the public, too, criticised the patient’s request as blatant racism.

While the code of consumers’ rights states, “Every consumer has the right to express a preference as to who will provide services and have that preference met where practicable”, the clause is presumably intended to resolve individual personality clashes between patients and the nurses and doctors looking after them, not a blanket refusal to be treated by a swathe of ethnic groups coming under the umbrella term of “Asian”.

The request was blatant racism, and I think the hospital should have told the patient that if he doesn’t like the race of his medical staff, he is welcome to go elsewhere.

What went unremarked in the furore, however, is that the idea that patients might want to have medical staff who look like them and whom they feel comfortable with is officially sanctioned at the highest levels of the health system. Both Auckland and Otago medical schools run extensive race-based, affirmative-action programmes to do exactly that.

It’s an interesting point. The rationale is that patients may feel more comfortable with someone of their own ethnicity.

If a patient asked for a doctor of a specific ethnicity, as opposed to a doctor not of a specific ethnicity, would that also be unacceptable?