Seed Grant Award: Anti-racism and the Emergency Department: a Year-Long Program Towards Self-Inquiry and Institutional Progress

The purpose of this project is to develop a year-long educational curriculum on Anti-Racism for the Department of Emergency Medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons. As emergency providers, our faculty, trainees, and staff are confronted daily by the effects of racism on health outcomes, yet few of us have had any training or formal education on how to understand, talk about, or address issues of race as they relate to healthcare and ourselves. This longitudinal series of workshops seeks to begin these conversations across a multidisciplinary group of volunteers in our department. We recruited volunteers who express interest in learning about these issues and doing personal work to combat racism in our interpersonal interactions and patient care. We seeked funding to develop and execute a series of four lectures and workshops that could move our department into a position of engaging in active work against racism.

This project was spearheaded by the Department of Emergency Medicine’s newly formed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee, of which the proposed grantees (Dr. Almaz Dessie and Dr. Stefan Flores) are co-chairs.

This project was funded through the Addressing Racism: A Call to Action for Higher Education initiative of the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement.