This year, the Connecticut Chapter of the American College of Physicians (ACP) honored two Yale School of Medicine (YSM) faculty members. Shaili Gupta, MBBS, received the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award, and Donna Windish, MD, MPH, received the Thornton Teaching Award.
Gupta is an associate professor of medicine (general medicine) and has been at the forefront of professional and health equity research and policy at YSM. As an associate program director for the Internal Medicine Traditional Residency Program, she is deeply involved in medical education and has advocated for integrating health equity into residency curriculum and updating the Yale Office-Based Medicine Curriculum to include data on the social determinants of health.
Gupta’s work on professional equity started in 2019, when she noticed that women and people of color were experiencing harassment and bias from both patients and other providers. Additionally, she recognized areas of need in YSM’s reporting pathways and harassment training.
“Data showed that a respectful clinical environment promotes a better learning climate and wellness for learners, patients, and practitioners,” explained Gupta, adding that there was a need for a clear and coherent sexual harassment policy that would be consistent between the federal, academic, and community institutions that are all training sites for Yale. “This became one of the most passionate things I pursued,” she said.
One of Gupta’s implementations was re-enactment training workshops, which used standardized patients who portrayed a variety of biases to teach the trainees how to respond to and overcome them.
“People have trouble vocalizing their response to bias, and being placed in these realistic re-enactment scenarios helps them find their professional voice,” explained Gupta, who added that the training is expected of all chief residents in all departments and is offered to all YSM faculty members.
The power of this type of training is that the scripts are generated from real-life experiences and provide information on all reporting pathways. Gupta said. Her work has revolutionized the conversation surrounding professional and health equity at YSM.
Windish is a professor of medicine (general medicine) who currently works in both inpatient and outpatient internal medicine settings with the Yale Primary Care Residency program. She mentors two to four primary care residents throughout their three years of training. Outside of her clinical duties, Windish is heavily involved in medical education and leads the Research in Residency Program within the Yale Internal Medicine Primary Care Residency. She has mentored several recent resident- and fellowship-run research projects, including a project to develop a curriculum for treating patients with intellectual, cognitive, and physical disabilities.
Since 2016, Windish has served as program director for the General Internal Medicine Medical Education fellowship. She has been a member of the ACP since she was a medical student at the University of Connecticut.
Windish encourages Yale’s Primary Care residents to present their research, and finds great enjoyment in seeing their work come together. “I take my job as a mentor and teacher very seriously and focus on what we need to do to build that next generation of physicians,” she said.
General Internal Medicine is committed to the core missions of patient care, research, education, and community health from the “generalist” perspective and is one of the 11 sections within Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Internal Medicine. To learn more about their mission and work, visit General Internal Medicine.