Reflect and Reset: Black Academic Voices Call the Graduate Medical Education Community to Action

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the great achievements that the biomedical community can accomplish, but raised the question: Can the same medical community that developed a complex vaccine in less than a year during a pandemic help to defeat social injustice and ameliorate the epidemic of health inequity? In this article, the authors, a group of Black academics, call on the graduate medical education (GME) community to reset its trajectory toward solutions for achieving diversity, improving inclusion, and combating racism using education as the new vector. Sponsoring institutions, which include universities, academic medical centers, teaching hospitals, and teaching health centers, are the center of the creation and dissemination of scholarship. They are often the main sources of care for many historically marginalized communities. The GME learning environment must provide the next generation of medical professionals with an understanding of how racism continues to have a destructive influence on health care professionals and their patients. Residents have the practical experience of longitudinal patient care, and a significant portion of an individual’s professional identity is formed during GME; therefore, this is a key time to address explicit stereotyping and to identify implicit bias at the individual level. The authors propose 3 main reset strategies for GME—incorporating inclusive pedagogy and structural competency into education, building a diverse and inclusive learning environment, and activating community engagement—as well as tactics that sponsoring institutions can adapt to address racism at the individual learner, medical education program, and institutional levels. Sustained, comprehensive, and systematic implementation of multiple tactics could make a significant impact. It is an academic and moral imperative for the medical community to contribute to the design and implementation of solutions that directly address racism, shifting how resident physicians are educated and modeling just and inclusive behaviors for the next generation of medical leaders.

A Path Toward Equity and Inclusion: Establishing a DEI Committee in a Department of Pediatrics

“…The residency program also funded networking and mentoring events for URiM/HE faculty and residents, including those who identify as LGBTQ+, to foster inclusion, support, and mentorship. Working closely with the residency program directors, we also added DEI-specific goals to resident rotations focusing on equity, disparities, and how to discuss race and ethnicity as it relates to health outcomes (Blanchard et al, 2022 ).…”

Increasing Diversity in Residency Training Programs

“…Graduate Medical Education (GME) training for URM candidates is particularly demanding as they are frequently the targets of microaggressions and bias [ 16 ]. Blanchard et al propose specific strategies for GME which include incorporating inclusive pedagogy and structural competency into education and building and supporting a diverse learning environment [ 17 ]. The term “structural competency” is relatively new and encompasses recognizing the structures that shape clinical interactions and imagining structural interventions to improve outcomes [ 18 ].…”

Moving Forward Through the Pandemic With Strength, Resilience, and Adaptation in Academic Medicine

“…5 Academic medicine, the health professions, and health care systems are evolving to address the challenges of the past, present, and future, as illustrated by several articles appearing in this issue. 5–9…”