IMR Commitment to Address Racism
The University of Chicago Internal Medicine residents, core faculty and program leaders stand firmly against racism in health care and in society.
As a residency program with a diverse population of patients, residents and staff, we have seen racism and inequity in our institution, residency and community. Systemic racism affects the health and well-being of our residents, staff, and patients, particularly those patients that reside within our South Side community. As professionals dedicated to lifelong learning, we strive to provide equitable health care to all of our patients and work against systemic injustice in our community at large. Additionally, we will increase our efforts to foster a diverse and inclusive environment that enables all trainees to reach their unlimited potential as outstanding clinicians, educators, researchers and agents of change within our current and their future communities.
Our program leadership commits to building a diverse and inclusive environment. We are augmenting our current work to recruit, support, and retain a diverse residency class. We pledge to review applications holistically and enact interview strategies that minimize harmful bias. We will support, financially and administratively, our resident-run endeavors to support diversity and foster inclusion. We will increase the health care disparities content in our curriculum, including education about allyship training. We will require all program leadership and core faculty to undergo implicit bias training. Finally, we will increase our engagement with the community we serve outside the confines of the hospital wards and clinic exam rooms through long-term partnerships with community-based organizations.
Our residents strive to dismantle systemic racism and have created a committee dedicated to this work. Goals of this resident-led committee include improving the internal medicine education surrounding health, social and racial inequities by creating space and curricular content to address implicit bias and racial inequity. The committee also seeks to enact mechanisms for trainees to assess our learning climate and for residents to anonymously share and address experiences from their clinical experiences. Within our three residency firms, the committee plans to engage in community outreach and advocacy efforts as a way to connect and better understand the South Side community we serve.
Achieving health care equity and social justice is difficult and deliberate work. We pledge to listen, learn, and act over time to continually challenge our residency program and community towards progress. We wish to acknowledge our mistakes and reflect upon areas for growth. We aim to hold each other accountable in our pursuit of social and health care equity. We value all members of our residency community, each contributing a distinct and valued perspective. Together we continue to work towards a program culture that addresses social and health inequities and empowers all members of our residency to succeed personally and professionally.