The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai selected medical schools nationwide to enroll as partners in its Anti-Racist Transformation (ART) Medical Education initiative. Icahn Mount Sinai received 48 submissions from medical schools seeking enrollment in its initiative to use a formal change management process to address deep-rooted racism and bias. After evaluation, its selection committee selected 11 institutions to partner with, including:
College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan
Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles
Duke University School of Medicine
East Carolina University Brody School of Medicine
The George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences
The Ohio State University College of Medicine
University of Arizona College of Medicine – Phoenix
University of Minnesota Medical School
University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine
University of the Incarnate Word School of Osteopathic Medicine
“Part of this work is building capacity and building community. We can’t do that alone,” co-investigator of ART in Med Ed, Ph.D., MSW, Senior Director of the Strategy and Equity Education Program Leona Hess told the Amsterdam News. Dr. Hess believes that by “identifying and working with” the previously listed 11 schools, the work of dismantling entrenched racism and bias can continue to get done.
The selection committee’s decision followed their purposeful evaluation of each medical school’s “vision, commitment, administrative capacity, institutional alignment and diversity of institutions (geography, public/private, new/established schools).”
Similar to the committee’s purposeful elevation of potential partners, the committee members also underwent purposeful selection.
“We intentionally did not select a committee of institutional leaders to review the applications. We intentionally did not select a committee of people who have traditional credentials as experts in a particular field. We selected a committee of members who are doing the work, who are deeply committed and invested in the work. We purposely selected people from the full thickness of an institution’s community. From front-line staff, students, junior faculty, senior faculty and some people in leadership positions. We wanted it to be representative of everyone who is impacted by racism and bias and everyone who is contributing or will need to contribute to changing the culture of the institution,” MD, FACP, Dean for Medical Education, Icahn Mount Sinai, and a Principal Investigator of the initiative David Muller told the Amsterdam News. “We thought that that group would have the clearest eye on what makes a really good candidate as an institution applicant.”
According to Icahn Mount Sinai, their “project to dismantle racism in medical education gets underway immediately and will last about three years. The goal of the initiative is to transform culture and build capacity at each of these schools, in an effort to establish anti-racism as an organizing principle in medical education. The initiative includes a virtual learning platform designed to engage students, staff, and faculty in virtual experiential learning, assessments, outcome, and performance monitoring sessions, and coaching. The ART in Medical Education project replicates and adapts a framework developed by Mount Sinai faculty and students.”
For more information, visit https://www.mountsinai.org