Longitudinal Antiracism Training for Family Medicine Residency Faculty.

Abstract

Introduction: Medical educators have often perpetuated misunderstandings about race-based medicine and at times failed to create safe educational environments for diverse learners who frequently experience mistreatment. It is imperative that family medicine faculty be equipped to recognize and mitigate bias and inequities in our teaching, research, and clinical care.

Methods: Our residency formed a diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism (DEIA) faculty work group to address the need for faculty training. We developed and administered a 32-item needs assessment survey in 2020 to determine gaps in antiracist knowledge and skills among our faculty members. Over the following year, faculty members designed and implemented a series of faculty training sessions including a half-day faculty retreat to address the highest need areas. We reassessed faculty confidence and skills using a follow-up survey in 2021.

Results: Faculty respondents demonstrated increased confidence in their knowledge of various DEIA topics and ability to intervene when observing biased or culturally insensitive behaviors from colleagues. Participants also reported increased confidence in their ability to mitigate bias in their teaching and clinical work.

Conclusions: Our longitudinal DEIA faculty training series, embedded into the existing structure of the residency, resulted in improvements in DEIA-related confidence and skills among faculty members. This training model could be adapted to a variety of residency settings as one step toward dismantling racism in medical education and clinical practice.