Racial disparities in healthcare persist even in systems with universal access, and previous evidence suggests that such inequities are often sustained by subtle, implicit cognitive bias operating even among well-intentioned healthcare professionals. One such mechanism is attentional bias—the differential allocation of visual attention based on social categories such as race. While racialized attention has been widely studied in general social contexts, less is known about how it operates in healthcare settings, particularly under conditions of resource scarcity. Across two experimental studies conducted in Portugal, we investigated whether perceived scarcity modulates racial attentional bias toward intensive care stimuli. In Study 1 (N = 200 White Portuguese medical students), participants completed a dot-probe task in which racialized faces (White vs Black) were subliminally presented before the appearance of intensive care-related or neutral objects. Results showed a general attentional preference for intensive care stimuli (B = 17.22, t = 2.21, p = .03), but no significant racial modulation of attention. In Study 2 (N = 181 lay participants), we introduced an experimental manipulation of resource availability (scarcity vs abundance). Under scarcity, participants showed greater attentional bias toward Black faces (vs White) when followed by intensive care stimuli—consistent with an outgroup threat pattern. Although the effect did not reach conventional significance levels (B = 101.94, SE = 55.08, z = −1.85, p = .128, 95% CI [−209.89, 6.02]), the pattern supports the race-threating hypothesis. Under abundance, participants showed no attentional bias based on race. A differential attentional bias score showed that resource scarcity increased race-based attentional allocation.These findings underscore the importance of investigating how attentional bias may operate in healthcare contexts, particularly under contingency situations, such as scarcity. They highlight the need to address subtle, implicit processes that may shape clinical perception and judgment, even in the absence of explicit prejudice.