Sweden’s Equality Ombudsman, has described a growing trend for patients to choose a doctor based on ethnicity as a “worrying development”.
This follows a public appeal, signed by 1,011 doctors and medical students, in a daily newspaper calling on “the responsible authorities to act against racism” in their field.
The country’s largest broadsheet newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, published an investigative series exposing the scope of the problem.
Journalists posing as patients who had recently moved to a new city or town called 120 healthcare clinics and asked that their new doctor be an ethnic Swede.
A total of 51 clinics agreed to the request, 40 refused and only a handful explicitly said the request was unacceptable.
The situation has arisen as a result of a healthcare reform more than a decade ago which allows patients to choose their own doctor.
Prior to the reform Swedes were assigned a clinic based on where they lived but, as tensions smoulder over rising immigration in traditionally homogeneous Sweden, the reform has made it possible for patients to refuse to be treated by non-ethnic Swedes.
A 30-year-old doctor with overseas ancestry, Navid Ghan, said that when he was working in psychiatry, a patient cancelled his appointment three times because he didn’t want to be treated by a ‘foreign doctor’.
“In the end he didn’t have any choice, I was the only doctor available,” Dr Ghan said.
“During the appointment, even though he saw that I spoke Swedish without an accent, he told me ‘you foreigners, you don’t understand anything’,” he said.
Dr Ghan, whose name has been changed at his request to protect his identity, was raised and earned his medical degree in Sweden.
Sweden has seen its immigrant population double in the past two decades, statistics show, and support for the far-right Sweden Democrats has surged to 20 per cent, making it the third-biggest party.
Stockholm, 29 August 2021
