What does our data about doctors early bias mean?!

Varied challenges in gathering our sample limit what can be said about our data related to a larger group of children’s doctors. That means we know a super-majority. i.e., > 93%, of the 56 doctors who did our survey showed implicit bias towards persons with intellectual disability as measured by a well-validated computerized way of testing for what people may think, but not say, about this group of people. Similarly, we can say that most of these doctors saw a vignette infant with signs of meconium aspiration (fecal stool in the lungs) as not at risk for delay. Rather, terms like “healthy newborn” were used. In contrast, few doctors or no used this positive language for l infants with signs of the three at-risk medical conditions. What cannot be said is that most children’s doctors have this same type of bias against persons with intellectual disability. Neither can we conclude that among the larger group of children’s doctors, most of them expect good outcomes for babies who have breathed in fecal stool and poor outcomes for babies with signs of Trisomy 21, Cerebral palsy, of fetal alcohol effects. while this may be true, data from our study cannot be used to make this wider claim. Nevertheless, our data do raise questions about a possibility of early diagnosis-based bias in children’s doctors as a whole. I will present data on the advice doctors in our sample thought they might offer parents at two upcoming international conferences: (a) Gravens Conference on neonatal care (Sand Key, FL—March 2020); and (b) World Congress for the World Association of Infant Mental Health (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia—June 2020).