OB

But for Dr. Russell, the doctor-patient relationship and the notion of shared decision-making is always key — especially during pregnancy and childbirth. And it ...

"The wait time is not long, it's a pleasant experience to be seen, she's all about having conversations about my birth plan," Young says. A big red flag was when the practitioner she met with early on told her she was going to have a C-section, even though Young wanted to try to have a vaginal birth. The headache of paperwork and the effort it would take to shift medical records and figure out insurance coverage made Young hesitant to switch doctors, she adds. "Always make sure when you go to an appointment you have some kind of question for them to get answered." She says she was going to a practice where she met with a different person every time she had an appointment, making her wonder who would actually be with her when she was in labour. One frequent suggestion for women of colour, in particular, is to seek out a doctor of the same race. "If we're saying Black patients do better with Black doctors, Black doctors don't have the room for all the Black patients. From 2014 to 2019, the number of medical residents entering obstetrics and gynecology in the US who were Black And you should expect that those questions are in order to have a better sense of who you are as a person and to stratify risk and to help identify what are issues that might come up because of your family history or aspects of your lifestyle or unhealthy behaviours," Dr. Russell, for example, noticed that when she would give patients of different races the same diagnoses, such as pre-diabetes, white patients would often come back with a treatment plan from their other doctors, while Black patients would come back with the concerns waived off. But I have to help Black women in particular navigate the system a bit better," Dr. "It's really important that you should expect that your doctor is going to ask you a lot of questions.