The Department of Medicine welcomes diversity, and we are working on many different initiatives to help increase the number of our faculty/staff/trainees who identify as Underrepresented Minorites in Medicine (URIM) as well as make their experience here an even more positive one.
Please see below for just some of our current initiatives to increase and celebrate diversity within the DOM:
We created a Department-led Task Force to increase recruitment of Underrepresented Minorities in Medicine (URIM) into our training programs and to improve recruitment of minorities in our community.. The Task Force includes faculty, fellows, residents, and medical students from Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
The Task Force surveyed our faculty and trainees to assess how many URIM we have, defined more broadly than just race/ethnicity. We also included Religion, Sexual identification, Sexual preference, and Disability status. The survey also assessed baseline knowledge of Bias and Microaggressions as well as how many of our faculty and trainees have been victims of Bias and/or Microaggressions.
The Department of Medicine has recruited faculty (particularly URIM faculty) to serve as mentors to RWJMS students interested in Internal Medicine (specifically URIM students).
Department leadership and program directors met with our underrepresented minority fellows, in a focus group setting, to discuss what is done well, what is done poorly, and what could be done better in terms of recruitment and treatment of our underrepresented minorities.
The program directors worked together on a four page document that detailed common recommendations to increase recruitment of underrepresented minorities. From those recommendations, we created new interview procedures such as:
-All interviewers were trained in implicit bias.
-All interviewers were educated about the importance of a holistic review of applicants.
-All underrepresented minority Fellows and faculty from division were invited to interview applicants, and every effort was made to accommodate their schedule to do so.
-All applicants were invited to a social session and to speak one on one with our underrepresented minority fellows and faculty.
We started a Grand Rounds series on Health Inequity, which includes sessions on Bias in GME recruitment, Microaggressions (in a Morbidity and Mortality format), the impact of COVID on URM with a focus on Social Determinants of Health, and Health Care for the Latinx Community. Please click here for a complete list of all of our Grand Rounds conferences.
We implemented a new Transgender Clinic which will provide medical treatment as part of the PROUD Gender Center of New Jersey. https://www.rwjbh.org/rwj-university-hospital-new-brunswick/treatment-care/lgbtqia-program/meet-our-team/
We are creating a novel anonymous reporting system to report witnessed microaggressions or bias in both patient interactions and interactions involving trainees and faculty.
We instituted a rotation for every fellowship program to have trainees rotate through the DSRIP clinic, providing specialty care to underinsured and underresourced patients in our community. https://www.rwjbh.org/rwj-university-hospital-new-brunswick/treatment-care/transitional-care/
We are initiating scholarly projects aimed at quality improvement for URM patients as well as tracking URIM experiences during their IM rotations.
Please see a recent NY Times article by Rutgers President, Jonathan Holloway, on the history of Black men and women in our country, and how they have been treated as not human, not recognized as citizens, and not considered civilized.