Core Pillars

The core pillars of the Race, Bias, and Advocacy in Medicine distinction pathway are:

Focuses on enhancing the resident’s awareness of the legacy and impact of race and bias in clinical medicine and the position of Yale in the greater New Haven community.

Residents examine how they have been affected by and/or complicit in bias in medicine. In addition, participants will consider how race influences interactions within the hospital system - between a patient and a physician, between healthcare providers (physicians, students, nurses, advanced practitioners), and between a physician and the greater community and society. Finally, participants will strive to improve their understanding of the greater New Haven community and its relationship with Yale. As such, the introspection pillar is focused on empowering residents to develop the anti-racist, anti-bias framework for which they can approach medicine and the care of patients, with a more holistic perspective on the barriers to and limitations of equity in healthcare. This is accomplished by a combination of a series of lectures, reading, written reflections, facilitated small-group discussions, and workshops.

Involves developing participants as educators, ambassadors, and advocates of anti-racism within the medical school, residency program, hospital system, community, and world. At the medical school and residency level, resident participants will propose and deliver educational content for multiple venues including morning report, noon conference, student education, and others. At the hospital level, residents will propose initiatives for change within the hospital. At the community level, participants will partner with residents of New Haven to better understand the barriers to equity in healthcare. Participants will also develop their communication skills to advocate for equity in healthcare.

The capstone allows the resident to develop his or her passion within the topics of anti-racism, anti-bias, and advocacy work in the form of a project of his or her choice. A capstone project can manifest in many ways – be it community-based participatory research, quality improvement, narrative medicine, clinical research, clinical practice interventions, physician advocacy, and/or community engagement.

• Community engagement: examples of relevant past accomplishments include the “Walk with a Doc” program, as well as experience in existing clinical opportunities such as the street medicine elective and experience in the refugee clinic.
• Clinical practice interventions: examples include an electronic referral system connecting patients with race- and language-concordant mental health providers.
• Clinical research: one of our residents has already brought up a relevant project investigating the efficacy of an EPIC alert to reduce bias in prescription practices for acute pain.
• Quality Improvement: an example of which is the creation of a workflow to translate letters communicating the results of routine cancer screening to the patient’s preferred language.
• Physician Advocacy: including coalition-building, legislative advocacy, media appearances and authorship of opinion and editorial pieces.
• Community-Based Participatory Research:i.e., engaging community members in efforts that seek to improve diabetes outcomes in the population served by the Adult Primary Care Center.
• Narrative medicine: Utilizing stories and the arts (drawing, theater, painting, sculpture, etc.) as a means of reflection and/or deeper understanding of the “art of medicine”