Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Trainee

Centering marginalized voices: Applying a health equity lens to the practice of narrative medicine

Co-Leader(s)

• 

  Anoushka Sinha, MD, MS (she/her/hers)

  Adolescent & Young Adult Medicine Fellow
  UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital San Francisco
  San Francisco, California, United States

  Slides
• RT

  Rebecca Tsevat, MD, MS (she/her/hers)

  Postdoctoral Fellow
  Internal Medicine and Pediatrics
  National Clinician Scholars Program at UCLA
  Los Angeles, California, United States
• 

  Caroline Nguyen, MD (she/her/hers)

  Fellow Physician
  UCSF, United States

Workshop

Description: The global pandemic and racial reckoning of 2020 brought the structural inequities of our health care system to the forefront. While interventions aimed at clinical medicine and academia have moved the needle in the right direction, there remain massive health equity gaps, and patients belonging to historically excluded groups remain silenced. While narrative medicine (NM) has often been used to stimulate humanism and wellness, we propose a shift in the use of NM as a tool to dismantle existing power structures that perpetuate the marginalization of excluded voices – particularly of children who are known to be especially vulnerable to systemic inequities. In this workshop, we will discuss how to use NM to maximize patients’ agency by attending to and uplifting their stories. Through close reading and reflective writing, we will stimulate thoughtful introspection on personal and collective biases that stymie health equity. This interactive workshop is designed for pediatricians to learn the principles of NM with the aim of elevating diverse voices. We expect that participants will be able to apply these skills to their clinical work in order to promote child well-being, improve patient-provider communication, and contend with disparities in health care.