UCSF Bioethics Speaker Series: Yolonda Wilson, PhD

In health care environments, there are good data on the value of trust. For example, patients who trust their clinicians report fewer symptoms and greater satisfaction with their clinical encounters than those patients who don’t trust their clinicians. In specific studies of clinician race, it turns out that racial concordance between patient and clinician fosters greater trust for the patient.

At the same time, I worry that relying too heavily on the value of trust may overshadow the structural injustice that operates in the background (and often the foreground) of health care environments. I explore this worry in greater depth and show why re-thinking trust matters for health justice. 

Yolonda Y. Wilson is an associate professor in the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University, with additional affiliations in the departments of Philosophy and African American Studies. She earned the Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars. Professor Wilson’s broad areas of interest include bioethics, social and political philosophy, race theory, and feminist theory. A 2019-2020 National Humanities Center fellow and a 2019-2020 Encore Public Voices fellow, Professor Wilson is currently working on a monograph entitled Black Death: Racial Justice, Priority-Setting, and Care at the End of Life, in which she uses end of life care to argue that, given historic and continuing racial injustice leading to African Americans being unfairly burdened with ill health, African Americans have a special justice claim on health care.