Background: Racism is a public health crisis impacting patients and healthcare workers. Antiracist education is not typical in undergraduate or graduate medical education curriculum. Discriminatory practices in health care result in worse patient outcomes in Black, Indigenous, & People of Color (BIPOC). Committing to antiracist work is the first step in addressing racism and must be followed by antiracist education & action to create meaningful change. Lanes to Justice (LTJ) is a twice monthly antiracist education & action newsletter curated by Legacy Inpatient Medicine Service & Graduate Medical Education Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Committees, provided to residents & faculty. Care is taken to provide both antiracist education & action opportunities creating concrete antiracist impact.
Purpose: The objectives of LTJ are: To create an ongoing resource with antiracist education & action opportunities for our medical staff & residents, teach learners to be antiracist healthcare workers, provide physician educators with tools to teach antiracist education & action to their learners, leverage existing financial incentive of the Physician Engagement Program (PEP) for antiracist work among our providers, & create a foundation of antiracist education & action to improve social determinants of health of our community.
Description: LTJ is a twice monthly antiracist education & action newsletter. Each issue is divided into 2 lanes: an education lane & an action lane. Educational lanes are provided to increase knowledge through multiple media forms. Action lanes empower physicians to participate in activities such as volunteering, donating, joining an antiracist organization, or advocacy to their government representatives to create concrete antiracist impact. Each issue also includes resources to educate children. The newsletter sequencing is pre-planned, however, we pivot to address just-in-time training on recent events such as the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes & the Capitol insurrection. We catalog all resources & have bi-annual summaries to reinforce specific principles & introduce new readers to the work. Faculty physicians & advanced practice providers can log time spent on educational items for an employee engagement incentive. Each issue is curated by a team of physicians. Readers are also able to submit items for inclusion in future issues.
Conclusions: 6 months after the initial release of LTJ we evaluated both groups with a survey to assess engagement. These results revealed increased engagement in educational items from yearly or never to weekly or monthly. The majority of participants had never engaged in action items, but after LTJ are now participating yearly or monthly. On review of the engagement incentive data in March of 2021 it was found that faculty physicians logged 495 hours of antiracist education work which represented 12% of submissions for the fiscal year. Initially created for our internal medicine residency program & its faculty, LTJ it is now distributed throughout our health system including to senior leaders and portions are used in the weekly newsletter sent to all employees & medical staff. We have seen ongoing engagement & by continuing to provide these resources, we will advance our mission of being an antiracist organization. This change has the potential to impact patient outcomes. As an ongoing and iterative process in education & action in diversity, equity, & inclusion (DEI), it is extensive and requires constant engagement & learning.
