Importance: Physicians who belong to minoritized racial and ethnic groups remain underrepresented and underpromoted. Serving as a chief resident is an important position of leadership and prestige, and indicates a benchmark for future professional success. However, it is unknown if disparities in race and/or sex exist in the chief resident selection process.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Medical educational societies have emphasized the inclusion of marginalized populations, including the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) population, in educational curricula. Lack of inclusion can contribute to health inequality and mistreatment due to unconscious bias. Little didactic time is spent on the care of LGBTQ+ individuals in emergency medicine (EM) curricula.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLetters of reference (LORs) are a common component of the application process for residency training programs. With the United States Medical Licensing Examination Step 1 transitioning to pass/fail grading and with the increasing use of holistic review, the potential role of LORs is rising in importance. Among some key benefits are the ability to provide a broader and more holistic view of applicants, which can include highlighting elements of experiences or skills that could be missed in their application, as well as providing a third-party assessment of the applicant external to their rotation experiences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Creating an inclusive and equitable learning environment is a national priority. Nevertheless, data reflecting medical students' perception of the climate of equity and inclusion are limited.
Objective: To develop and validate an instrument to measure students' perceptions of the climate of equity and inclusion in medical school using data collected annually by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).
Objective: In recent years, the academic medicine community has produced numerous statements and calls to action condemning racism. Though health equity work examining health disparities has expanded, few studies specifically name racism as an operational construct. As emergency departments serve a high proportion of patients with social and economic disadvantage rooted in structural racism, it is critically important that racism be a focus of our academic discourse.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: First-generation (FG) medical students remain underrepresented in medicine despite ongoing national efforts to increase diversity; understanding the challenges faced by this student population is essential to building holistic policies, practices, and learning environments that promote professional actualization. Although FG students have been extensively studied in the undergraduate literature, there is little research investigating how FG students experience medical education or opportunities for educators to intervene.
Objective: To explore challenges that FG students experience in undergraduate medical education and identify opportunities to improve foundational FG support.
Best practices to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the biomedical workforce remain poorly understood. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education launched the Barbara Ross-Lee, DO, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion award for sponsoring institutions to celebrate efforts to improve DEI in graduate medical education (GME). To identify themes in practices used by award applicants to improve DEI efforts at their institutions, using a qualitative design.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Racial Ethn Health Disparities
November 2023
Background: Racism-related stress is a root cause of racial and ethnic disparities in mental health outcomes. An individual may be exposed to racism directly or vicariously by hearing about or observing people of the same racial and/or ethnic group experience racism. Although the healthcare setting is a venue by which healthcare workers experience both direct and vicarious racism, few studies have assessed the associations between direct and vicarious racism and mental health outcomes among healthcare workers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Previous studies have demonstrated sex-specific disparities in performance assessments among emergency medicine (EM) residents. However, less work has focused on intersectional disparities by ethnoracial identity and sex in resident performance assessments.
Objective: To estimate intersectional sex-specific ethnoracial disparities in standardized EM resident assessments.
Importance: Asian American physicians have experienced a dual pandemic of racism and COVID-19 since 2020; understanding how racism has affected the learning environment of Asian American medical students is necessary to inform strategies to promoting a more inclusive medical school environment and a diverse and inclusive workforce. While prior research has explored the influence of anti-Asian racism on the experiences of Asian American health care workers, to our knowledge there are no studies investigating how racism has impacted the training experiences of Asian American medical students.
Objective: To characterize how Asian American medical students have experienced anti-Asian racism in a medical school learning environment.
Objective: Examine the association between sex, race, ethnicity, and family income, and the intersectionality between these identities, and sustained or cultivated paths in surgery in medical school.
Methods: This retrospective cohort study examines US medical students who matriculated in academic years 2014-2015 and 2015-2016. Data were provided by the Association of American Medical Colleges, including self-reported sex, race, ethnicity, family income, interest in surgery at matriculation, and successful placement into a surgical residency at graduation.
Importance: Surgeon-scientists are uniquely positioned to facilitate translation between the laboratory and clinical settings to drive innovation in patient care. However, surgeon-scientists face many challenges in pursuing research, such as increasing clinical demands that affect their competitiveness to apply for National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding compared with other scientists.
Objective: To examine how NIH funding has been awarded to surgeon-scientists over time.