Implicit bias can affect patient care at the physician level when they’re making treatment decisions and at the healthcare organization level when they’re choosing new hires. Here are insights into strategies rheumatologists can use to become aware of, and question, their implicit biases.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific and medical conferences began to be canceled or postponed. Later, once the pandemic endured beyond the scope of weeks to months, many organizations shifted conferences to a virtual format. Now, as the federal government has ended the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency, effective mitigation measures, including vaccination, rapid testing, masking…
Modern healthcare is, for better or for worse, the hybrid of many different fields—some that are expected, such as biomedical science, and others that are less well appreciated, such as astrology and palmistry. One modern contributor to healthcare is management. Nowadays, we’re inundated with all sorts of jargon from the business and policy worlds: turnover,…
Resilience. That word has been living rent free in my head for the past three weeks. And rent free is a bit of understatement. It all began at the end of a very productive clinic, when the trainee and I sat down to discuss our reflections on the interactions with patients that we’d had in…
Over the past 16 months, the world has shone a bright light on the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Although the College has been focused on diversity initiatives since 2020, the interprofessional division of the College, the ARP, has recently taken a deeper dive into DEI initiatives in its processes, procedures and volunteering….
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are the focus of a new ACR/ARP subcommittee of the Collaborative Initiatives (COIN) Special Committee. The 13-member group will explore strategies to increase diversity in the rheumatology workforce pipeline and reduce implicit bias in such organizational processes as speaker recruitment and abstract review. “There is a new awareness at the…
Everyone wants to be accepted and feel like they belong. These are innately human traits, and they don’t go away when we leave the grade school playground, high school cafeteria or university quad. We want to feel safe and accepted at work, too, and that feeling is important to professional success and effectiveness. From a…
Diversity, equity and inclusion have implications for pediatric patient care and the rheumatology workforce.
“What are you?” A faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine posed this question to a resident while attending rounds. Both were portraying a scene involving micro-aggression during Differences Matter, a three-day orientation for first-year medical students. On the program’s first day, students are introduced to unconscious bias and…