Chief Resident Phoenix Children's Phoenix, Arizona, United States
Background: Systemic racism is a public health issue and is a contributing factor to health disparities of communities that are marginalized.[1] Medical education serves to prepare a physician workforce focused on providing excellent, equitable care for the communities it serves, however, it lacks depth in how to use race appropriately in medical decision making. [2] This leads to the propagation of health disparities through the continued use of flawed clinical calculators and pathways that are based on inaccurate concepts of race. Objective: Educate third year medical students on the role of race/ethnicity in pediatric clinical algorithms and guidelines as a means to influence the students’ clinical decision making. Design/Methods: In this pre-post survey study, third year medical students enrolled at three local, affiliated medical schools and completing their pediatric clerkship at Phoenix Children’s July–December 2023 will be invited to participate. Each student will individually view an instructional onboarding video about the historical role that race/ethnicity play in the creation of clinical algorithms and guidelines along with common misconceptions and presence or lack of evidence to support the algorithms/guidelines. Pre-video and post-video surveys will assess the medical students’ application of current clinical algorithms, guidelines, and management protocols to the following pediatric clinical cases: asthma, cystic fibrosis, urinary tract infection, and coccidioidomycosis (Valley Fever). Descriptive analyses will summarize responses from the pre- and post-video surveys using count and percent for categorical variables, and the mean and standard deviation or median and interquartile range for continuous measures. Changes in pre-post responses will be assessed using analyses (McNemar’s, McNemar-Bowker, paired T-test or Wilcoxon signed rank sum test) as appropriate for the data distribution and paired nature of the data. All statistical tests will be 2-sided, with significance evaluated at the 5% level. Study is IRB approved. (1,348 characters with spaces)
