Race and Medicine

Exploring experiences of racism in medical education

Leading with action on issues of health justice has been a long-standing challenge for health professionals, who are often more comfortable with descriptive research as the main focus of intervention. In our department, the Black Lives Matter movement created a window of opportunity for open critique of current inequities in health care practices and direct conversations about structural racism. Residents and faculty called for hospital-wide communications clearly stating our values, mandatory training on implicit bias for all hospital staff and faculty, visible solidarity with immigrant patients and staff, a more welcoming environment for all patients and employees, and commitments to racial, ethnic, gender, and other forms of diversity.

Students at Tufts Medical School organized a series of “Race Dialogues” with a community facilitator in order for students to directly discuss issues of race, racial bias, and their impact on the students as individuals and as physicians-in-training. Twenty-five first-year medical students participated in this series of five, 2-hour sessions. We surveyed students before and after the completion of the series to assess their level of knowledge and comfort in discussing race and racism and additionally surveyed their non-participating classmates as a comparison group. We will outline the intervention, present the results of this survey, and discuss implications for the expansion of the program at Tufts and potential for implementation in other settings. STFM 2017 Conference on Medical Student Education Presentation.

These are the slides accompanying a daylong STFM 2017 pre conference on teaching about race, racism and racial justice. Please refer to the STFM 2017 "Toolkit for Teaching About Racism in the Context of Persistent Health and Healthcare Disparities" which is a supplemental facilitator's guide that has separately been uploaded to the STFM Resource Library.

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This toolkit was formed by the listed contributors who sought to explore how to teach health care providers to reduce healthcare inequities. Our discussions have focused on race and racism but include a larger critical dialogue on bias, identity, intersectionality, and privilege. This toolkit provides examples of resources and activities that many of us are using in our attempts to teach these topics. We acknowledge that there are many other useful resources out there and we continue to seek them out. We hope that you will find this information useful in creating your own learning activities and that you will join us in our efforts to develop innovative, challenging and thoughtful ways to teach beyond disparities.