Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellow Children's National Health System Children's National Hospital Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Background: As graduate medical education programs expand training to address systemic and structural health inequities, it is apparent that many faculty lack the educational foundation to effectively teach and model health equity principles. Currently, there is limited literature on faculty development related to health equity and the approach needed to adequately train this workforce. Objective: To explore faculty’s perspectives on teaching and modeling health equity principles to inform the design and evaluation of a faculty health equity curriculum. Design/Methods: This qualitative study consisted of key informant interviews with pediatric faculty from teaching hospitals in the United States. Each interview was professionally led and transcribed. Using a hybrid of inductive and deductive approaches to content analysis, 3 of the authors independently coded 6 de-identified transcripts to create a codebook. One investigator coded the remaining transcripts. The team then met to identify patterns and themes by consensus. Results: Sixteen pediatric faculty from across the United States participated in this study. Participants expressed the importance of health equity education being prioritized and awareness of resources to access health equity education. However, they also shared apprehensions regarding their abilities to adequately teach due to clinical time constraints, topic sensitivity, and teaching trainees who are often more knowledgeable in this area than them. Additionally, faculty expressed competing academic priorities and lack of protected time as anticipated barriers to engaging in faculty development training sessions. They recommended mandating sessions to ensure participation. Faculty development trainings are commonplace, however, to result in behavior change, participants emphasized the curriculum must be interactive and action oriented. Lastly, when asked how faculty should be evaluated, participants discussed self-evaluation and/or having trainees and patients evaluate faculty’s abilities to teach and provide equitable care as strategies to consider.
Conclusion(s): To dismantle the practice of race-based medicine, the physician workforce must be equipped with the skills and knowledge to integrate health equity principles into clinical practice. This study illustrates that although faculty are apprehensive about teaching health equity topics, they have insight into how to make these trainings more effective such as making trainings interactive and mandating attendance. The findings from this study can be applied to the development of future faculty health equity trainings.
