Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The Department of Medicine is committed to creating a community built upon the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our trainees, staff, and patients come from diverse backgrounds and the Department recognizes that inclusive culturally sensitive practice is essential to improving the health of our local and global communities. To achieve our goals, we started a Racism/Diversity taskforce that will work to increase diversity through education at all levels of the Department, educate against eliminating bias, and foster inclusiveness.

We have established the following working groups to develop concrete action items with metrics and target benchmarks to monitor efficacy.

Recruitment – Liaison, Maria Garcia, MD, MPH: Develop, implement, and evaluate a comprehensive plan for recruitment/retention that focuses on enhancing cultural diversity. 

Education – Liaison, P.Y. Fan, MD: Develop formal curricula and educational strategies to educate faculty, trainees, staff, and administration on diversity. 

Culture/Bias - Liaison, Sakeina Howard-Wilson, DO: Implement a process of identifying and eliminating bias and micro- and macroaggressions. Develop guidelines for an inclusive environment that provides psychological, social, and cultural conditions for the growth and development of faculty, trainees, and staff.

Patient Care - Liaison, Nievel Williams: Identity, develop and implement strategies to achieve health equity by mitigating health and health care disparity factors that affect patient care.

Leadership/Career development - Liaison, Jennifer Reidy, MD: Build leadership, enhance opportunity career advancement in a culturally responsive environment.

Research – Liaison, Pranoti Mandrekar, PhD: Support diverse workforce to improve health through research that identifies, explains and addresses health care disparities.

Physician Executive for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, Lauren Feld, MD: Represent our department’s faculty, staff, house staff, and fellows on issues such as parental leave and gender equity.