Evaluating the impact of an educational intervention on the history of racism in America for teaching structural competency to medical academicians

TL;DR

This paper evaluates an educational series on the history of racism in America to help medical educators teach structural competency and address health inequities.

Contribution

The paper introduces a six-part educational series to train health professionals on structural racism and its impact on health disparities.

Findings

The series significantly improved participants' knowledge and understanding of structural racism and its health impacts.

Participants reported increased comfort in discussing racism and its effects through structured learning and debriefing.

Women were more likely to attend the sessions, suggesting gender differences in engagement with anti-racism education.

Abstract

A challenge facing many Academic Health Centers (AHCs) attempting to revise health professions education to include the impact of racism as a social and structural determinant of health (SSDoH) is a lack of broad faculty expertise to reinforce and avoid undermining learning modules addressing this topic. To encourage an institutional culture that is in line with new anti-racism instruction, we developed a six-part educational series on the history of racism in America and its impact on contemporary health inequities for teaching structural competency to health professions academicians.

We developed a six-hour elective continuing education (CE) series for faculty and staff with the following objectives: (1) describe and discuss race as a social construct; (2) describe and discuss the decolonization of the health sciences and health care; (3) describe and discuss the history of systemic racism and structural violence from a socio-ecological perspective; and (4) describe and discuss reconciliation and repair in biomedicine. The series was spread over a six-month period and each monthly lecture was followed one week later by an open discussion debriefing session. Attendees were assessed on their understanding of each objective before and after each series segment.

We found significant increases in knowledge and understanding of each objective as the series progressed. Attendees reported that the series helped them grapple with their discomfort in a constructive manner. Self-selected attendees were overwhelmingly women (81.8%), indicating a greater willingness to engage with this material than men.

The series provides a model for AHCs looking to promote anti-racism and structural competency among their faculty and staff.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-024-05626-5.

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