Personal and collective responsibility for health equity: An interprofessional education program around racism

Understanding the effects of racism on public health is necessary to stimulate structural and systemic change to improve the health outcomes of patients. As a healthcare team, racism is best addressed through interprofessional collaboration to develop equitable and sustainable solutions that transform the health and wellbeing of patients and communities. As a part of the collective effort to properly educate our health professional students about the declarations by local and county health departments that “racism as a public health crisis,” we sought to utilize an interprofessional collaboration model. A steering committee of faculty, staff, and students at The Ohio State University created a new longitudinal interprofessional education (IPE) exercise titled Personal and Collective Responsibility for Health Equity: Anti-Racism in Action (ARIA). The participating Colleges/Schools of Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing, Optometry, Pharmacy, Public Health, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS), Social Work, and Veterinary Medicine worked with leaders from the University's Office of Interprofessional Practice and Education to develop this 5-week program to engage a cohort of approximately 1300 students in a virtual learning experience during the Spring of 2021, when COVID-19 restricted in-person instruction. Ultimately, 200-interprofessional teams of 5–7 students were involved in this learning experience. Students individually selected resources (readings or videos) from a comprehensive resource kit provided by the steering team, to learn about and reflect on the differential types of racism, how it impacts well-being, health care delivery, and how health professionals can collaborate to advance health equity. The 200 interprofessional teams met twice virtually during the 5-week module and were provided with discussion questions and short assignments. Each team then contextualized, designed and submitted a final poster of a project to describe how an interprofessional approach to racism could further racial equity in health and healthcare delivery as applied to a selected perceived health equity issue, problem or dilemma. Student survey data was used to describe the effect of this module on student learning and attitudes. Students generally agreed that the module helped them to achieve the learning objectives. A thematic analysis of open-ended responses revealed that students generally had a positive response to the content on racism and the opportunity to learn interprofessionally, and they had specific suggestions for how to improve the experience. The results were utilized to re-design the activity for the following year and may be useful to other institutions wishing to address racism through interprofessional education.