IDEAS is a monthly webinar series that brings in experts from across academic medicine to share promising practices and effective resources to help you: 

Competency-Based Medical Education - A Framework for Advancing Equity for our Learners and our Patients | View Recording (registration required)

Competency Based Medical Education (CBME) is a paradigm shift that places individual and community health outcomes front and center. CBME provides a framework for educators to develop instructional and assessment approaches to achieve desired equitable patient outcomes. This session will highlight how implementation of CBME’s core components can be a driver for equity in the learning environment and advance equity in patient care. This session will be of broad interest to educators and learners across the medical education continuum as the academic medicine community at large seeks to address the persistent inequities in our health care, education, and assessment systems.

Nickens Lecture: The Importance of Institutions in our Personal Development and in our Society | View Recording (registration required)

Listen to the Honorable Louis W. Sullivan, MD, Founding Dean and President Emeritus of Morehouse School of Medicine and former U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services, for his 2024 Herbert W. Nickens Award lecture.

The Herbert W. Nickens Award was established by the AAMC in 2000 to honor the late Herbert W. Nickens, MD, MA, and his lifelong concerns about the educational, societal, and health care needs of racial and ethnic minorities. This award is given to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to promoting justice in medical education and health care. Learn more about the Herbert W. Nickens award here.


Allyship In Action: A series on allyship skills, lessons, and institutional programs

As institutions and individuals in academic medicine reaffirm their commitment to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion, there is increasing interest in allyship skills and practices to ensure we're all working toward building more supportive and inclusive environments. To accelerate our efforts to advance DEI, the AAMC is hosting a 3-part webinar series on allyship to discuss the skills and practices of being an effective and authentic ally, as well as showcasing promising institutional programs to firmly establish a culture of allyship and accountability in your organization. The first webinar in this series will cover core equity practices and skills, the second will feature a panel of leaders in academic medicine sharing their allyship journeys and lessons, and the third and final webinar will showcase institutional allyship programs that are showing progress in creating a culture of allyship. 

1. Engaging Allyship: Foundational Equity Practice Skills | View Recording (registration required)
This interactive webinar addresses the importance of foundational equity skills and why they are critical to organizational cultures of safety, inclusion, and wellbeing. This learning opportunity outlines diversity, equity, and inclusion principles and values and establishes foundational behaviors that everyone can apply within their respective institutional roles.

2. Allyship in Practice: Leadership Panel on Learning to be an Ally | View Recording (registration required)
Building off the foundational practices shared in the first webinar, this webinar features a facilitated panel of experienced allies in academic medicine to share information for those new or experienced in their allyship practice. In a fireside chat style conversation, leaders will share their allyship journeys of learning how to be allies, what behaviors best exemplify allyship, and what hard lessons they learned along the way.

3. Allyship Showcase: Institutional Programs to Support Allyship | View Recording (registration required)
In the third and final webinar of this series, speakers will share insights into how to institutionalize allyship efforts at your institution. This webinar will showcase promising programs from academic medical centers that have established regular and embedded allyship efforts at their institutions.

Employing Restorative Practices and Civil Discourse to Heal an Institution | View Recording (registration required)

The Uniformed Services University (USU) F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine has struggled with community building, communicating across differences, and managing harms to students and faculty, and they are not alone. In this webinar, USU faculty will introduce participants to the tenets of restorative practices and demonstrate the benefits of community circles. They will then introduce the principles of civil discourse to include the importance of psychological safety, active listening, finding common ground, being willing to rethink perspectives and beliefs, and practicing constructive conversational skills.

Speakers will walk participants through a curriculum developed and employed at the USU School of Medicine and share outcome data. Ultimately, they will demonstrate how the combination of restorative practice and civil discourse can serve as one starting point for healing our medical institutions and increasing connection between community members.

Learning objectives: 

1. Define Restorative Justice and describe its foundational principles
2. Define Civil Discourse and discuss the challenges to engaging
3. Assess a Community Building for Civil Discourse curriculum
4. Reflect on how Restorative Justice and Civil Discourse could be implemented in other contexts

Inclusive and Safe Environments in Academic Medicine Series

This series will feature ways in which AAMC-member institutions are implementing equity-focused interventions to cultivate safe and inclusive environments for their learners, faculty, staff, patients, and communities. Speakers will highlight strategies that help foster cultural awareness and belonging in academic medicine, such as relationship-centered skill-building, nonpartisan voter education, and more. This series was developed in partnership with the Group on Diversity and Inclusion (GDI) and the Group on Women in Medicine and Science (GWIMS).

1. Achieving Inclusivity in Medicine Beginning Day 1: Experiences of Learners and Faculty Facilitators | View Recording (registration required)
Given the need to provide high-quality care for increasingly diverse populations, it is essential for medical students to develop the skills and professional dispositions to identify and meet the needs of all patients. Indiana University School of medicine (IUSM) partnered with the Academy of Communication in Healthcare to develop the Achieving Inclusivity in Medicine (AIM) program for all incoming medical students.

2. Mitigating Misogynoir in Academic Medicine | View Recording (registration required)
As academic medicine begins to recognize how structural racism drives inequitable health outcomes, it must also acknowledge the effects of structural racism on its workforce and culture. Black physicians comprise ~5% of the United States physician population. Unique adversities affect Black women physicians, particularly during residency training, and contribute to the lack of equitable workforce representation.

3. Voters’ Education Initiative: Engagement and Empowerment | View Recording (registration required)
Medical schools and teaching hospitals can support an inclusive democracy by encouraging civic engagement among learners, staff, and patients. Nonpartisan voter registration is a simple yet effective way for these institutions to advance their commitment to health equity and is allowable under federal law. The AAMC has developed a fact sheet in collaboration with Vot-ER, a nonpartisan organization that works to integrate voter education and registration into health care settings.

Developing Diverse and Inclusive Leaders within Academic Medicine Series

In this three-part series, expert faculty will discuss the importance of cultivating leaders to foster and support inclusive excellence in academic medicine. Drawing from their diverse perspectives, speakers will present multiple strategies to nurture leaders at various stages of their careers, including mentorship, creating opportunities, conceptual frameworks, navigating pushback, adaptive conflict resolution, and more. The IDEAS “Developing Diverse and Inclusive Leaders within Academic Medicine” series was developed in partnership with the Group on Diversity and Inclusion (GDI) and the Group on Women in Medicine and Science (GWIMS).

1.  Developing Inclusive Leaders in Polarizing Times | View Recording (registration required)
This talk reframes adaptive leadership as a learning strategy, so leaders can recognize applicable the type of conflict and choose to act based a set of proven practices.

2.  Women of Color: Leadership, Retention, and Toxic Environments | View Recording (registration required)
This session will address the challenges women of color face in achieving and maintaining leadership positions in academic medicine and identify factors that lead to inclusive, supportive and equitable work environments.

3.  Building Equity Ambassadors into Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Leaders | View Recording(registration required)
After participating in this webinar, attendees should be able to identify the important variables necessary to create an effective strategic plan, consider the institutional and departmental values for growth expansion along the antiracist continuum, and build sustainability through advancing a thriving culture for institutional growth.

Disability Representation and Inclusion within Academic Medicine Series

In this four-part series, members of the disability community and disability experts from across the continuum discussed the need for increased representation and inclusion of people with disabilities in academic medicine. The recorded webinars provide key information on how professionals can support the inclusion of students and faculty at their institutions as well as their disability resource offices. 

1. Becoming a Researcher: Inclusion and Accessibility in the Lab Environment | View Recording (registration required)
This recorded webinar focuses on becoming a researcher in academic medicine and hearing from researchers with disabilities on how they have navigated and experienced graduate education, training, and beyond.

2. Sharing the Experiences of Faculty with Disabilities in Academic Medicine | View Recording (registration required)
This recorded webinar featured a discussion with faculty in academic medicine to discuss their experiences with navigating the academic environment as an individual with a disability.

3. Disability Resource Professionals (DRPs): Supporting Disability Equity and Accessibility | View Recording (registration required)
DRPs shared their experiences and perspectives in supporting people with disabilities in academic medicine, explain the structures in place at health professions institutions to advance disability access and inclusion, and demystify the process for students and advanced trainees.

4. Empowering Tomorrow’s Leaders: Medical Students and Residents with Disabilities | View Recording (registration required)
In this webinar, learners with disabilities discussed their experiences applying to and entering medical school and residency, ways they have found support and mentorship at their institutions, challenges they have faced on their journeys, and their work and leadership enhancing genuine disability access and inclusion in medicine.

ProDiGIE: A New Tool to Measure Student Perceptions of Equity and Inclusion in Medical School  | View Recording (registration required)

Though creating and sustaining an inclusive and equitable learning environment is a national priority, readily available tools for assessing medical students’ perceptions and experiences are limited. The new Promoting Diversity, Group Inclusion, and Equity (ProDiGIE) instrument is a tool that can measure medical students’ perceptions of equity and inclusion in the learning environment using data collected annually by the AAMC. Panelists will discuss how they developed and validated ProDiGIE, and how, in the future, medical schools could use it to obtain a global assessment of the climate of equity and inclusion at their institution and identify areas for improvement to address disparities for their learners.


Everything we need is already here: Tapping internal capacity for restorative justice  | View Recording (registration required)

Restorative justice (RJ) is a deep and wide ethical lens for approaching conflict and harm. Many are drawn to RJ to resolve an ongoing conflict, soon realizing the power of preventing conflict via RJ and using its processes to build trust and community. The gravity and perceived risks of some aspects of RJ can make getting started rather daunting. This recoded webinar presented an approach that emphasizes the RJ mindset and restorative storytelling as practices for transforming how we engage our co-workers and communities as we build capacity for other restorative practices.

Developing the Next Generation of Physicians as Policy Advocates to Advance Health Equity | View Recording (registration required)

All policy is health policy. Healthcare providers who act as advocates have the potential to contribute to the overall quality of life of their community. Through advocacy, education, and collaboration, physicians, residents and medical students are uniquely positioned to influence those who shape and enact policy at the local, state, and federal level.

Panelists in this recorded webinar discussed why it is important for health professionals to be involved in shaping policy, provided examples of advocacy, and walked through the AAMC’s new toolkit designed to assist health professions learners in Washington, DC to leverage their role to drive positive social change as they advocate with and for their patients and communities. Although this toolkit was designed for learners in the District of Columbia, the principles could be applied in other regions nationally.



Building an Insurer-Driven, Performance-Based LGBTQ+ Provider Directory | View Recording (registration required)

Finding providers who are able to treat LGBTQ+ individuals seeking healthcare with dignity and respect is a paramount priority for LGBTQ+ patients. Nearly 10 percent of LGBTQ+ patients and over 20% of transgender patients report harsh or abusive language when receiving treatment, and nearly as many have been refused care due to sexual orientation or gender identity. These experiences discourage LGBTQ+ patients from seeking healthcare. Many have sought to address this gap by creating LGBTQ+ provider directories connecting LGBTQ+ patients to non-discriminatory providers.

While provider directories are an efficient way to connect LGBTQ+ patients to providers, there are several challenges: directories are often opt-in, relying on provider attestation of their care for LGBTQ+ patients; directories may not distinguish between clinical ability to provide LGBTQ+ specific healthcare versus “friendliness” towards LGBTQ+ patients; oversight and monitoring of directory quality and patient complaints is lacking; and directories often don’t interface with healthcare systems, including insurance coverage and quality monitoring. 

The UPMC Health Plan sought to address these concerns by launching the UPMC LGBTQ+ Affirming Provider directory in June 2022, an accredited, opt-in, training-based provider directory allowing LGBTQ+ patients to identify providers who can validate the LGBTQ+ patient experience and create a safe and welcoming patient-provider relationship. This webinar reviewed the 1-year impact and initial positive feedback of this designation as well as the value and best practices of LGBTQ+ provider directories.  

Addressing LGBTQIA+ Health in Academic Medicine | View Recording (registration required)

Drs. Kristen Eckstrand and Jennifer Potter discussed the impact of recent anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation on the health and safety of LGBTQ+ individuals and communities. 

The speakers provided an analysis of the opportunities and strategies that professionals in the academic medicine community can deploy to oppose harmful legislation and continue to be a national leader in advancing LGBTQ+ health equity. 

Learning objectives: 
•    Describe the dramatic upward trend in anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation during the past 5 years.
•    Discuss the impact of anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation on the health and safety of LGBTQ+ people
•    Analyze opportunities for academic medicine to continue to serve as a national leader in advancing methodologies to describe and respond to the needs of LGBTQIA+ communities and disseminating evidence-based scientific information to the general public.

Culturally-Responsive Support For Medical Student Mental Health | View Recording (registration required)

In recent years, there has been an increased awareness of the mental health challenges faced by many medical students. Stressors include academic workload, competition with peers, work-life balance, family demands, financial obligations, and emotionally taxing experiences. 

Medical students overall demonstrate higher rates of depression, suicidal ideation, and stigmatization around depression compared to the overall population, and are often less likely to seek support. Furthermore, the COVID-19 era ushered in a new norm of uncertainty that may have contributed to increases in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and depression among medical students, with disparate impacts on students underrepresented in medicine.  

This video highlights the critical need to share effectual strategies to address medical students' mental health. Mental health practitioners will present culturally-responsive approaches and insights to support students, focusing on marginalized identities. The discussion will also address common barriers and emphasize the significance of early interventions, diagnoses, and continuous support to enhance academic success. 


This video supports administrators and student service providers with:
1.    Strategies to better assess and identify when students are presenting with mental illness.
2.    Insight into common barriers to providing specialized mental health care and pathways for overcoming them.
3.    Practical examples of institutions implementing effective student mental health programs.


Using Inclusive Language in Scholarly Writing: A Roundtable Discussion | View Recording (registration required)

This webinar provided information and guidance on the use of language that is inclusive and accurate in its depiction of identity, lived experiences, health and well-being, and health outcomes. Panelists discussed the principles of using inclusive language across their roles as scholars, authors, reviewers, and editors and offered practical strategies for writing that aligns with inclusive language best practices and welcomes the diversity of all people and their identities. 

This webinar is a collaboration between the Scholarly Publishing Webinar Series and the IDEAS Learning Series.

Creating an Inclusive Academic Environment: Exploring Appreciative Inquiry in Advising | View Recording (registration required)

Advising inclusively is essential for ensuring all medical students access relevant and supportive career advising. Appreciative advising is an approach that considers six advising phases: Disarm, Discover, Dream, Design, Deliver, and Don’t Settle. Appreciative advising guides advisors to create a space for advisees to explore all their career options and find a specialty and residency program that meets their careers goals. Advisors viewing this webinar will be able to Identify the basic principles of inclusive advising and incorporate those techniques into their advising meetings with students. 

Advising inclusively helps ensure all medical students seek and access career advising; limits bias--whether related to implicit biases about personal characteristics or specialty stereotypes--in advising conversations; signals to students they are welcome and supported in the medical profession; and creates space for students to fully explore, identify, and pursue the specialty and career options that ultimately lead to career satisfaction and support well-being.


My Journey to Discover Why African Americans Live Sicker and Die Younger | View Recording (registration required)

More than three decades ago, Dr. Thomas A. LaVeist learned that there were race disparities in health. Today that fact is common knowledge, but it was less common then. He wondered why these disparities existed and sought answers in the research literature. Surprised by the lack of satisfying answers, he devoted his career to finding one. In this session, Dr. LaVeist shares his insights. 

Becoming Active Bystanders and Advocates: Teaching Medical Students to Respond to Bias in the Clinical Setting | View Recording (registration required)

Incidents of bias and microaggressions are prevalent in the clinical setting and are disproportionately experienced by racial minorities, women, and medical students. These incidents contribute to burnout. This recording provides an overview of a workshop developed at Vanderbilt School of Medicine that teaches medical students a framework to respond to incidents of bias. The facilitator guide and relevant workshop/course materials are freely available from the AAMC MedEdPORTAL collection to aid in the implementation of this model at other institutions.

Disrupting Bullying in Academic Medicine | View Recording (registration required)

While academic medicine encourages teamwork, empathy and altruism, a culture of incivility persists that permits workplace bullying. Bullying involves offenders abusing authority positions and targeting individuals in order to impede their education or career growth. Bullying also affects patient care and causes some individuals to leave the workforce. This webinar will help participants/organizations recognize workforce bullying and discuss tools to disrupt this uncivil behavior.

Transforming Medical Education to Advance Equity and Inclusion | View Recording (registration required)

This video features institutions that are transforming medical education to advance racial equity and create inclusive learning environments. Within the transformational learning framework, medical students, residents, faculty, and staff are challenged to question, criticize, and self-reflect on the inequitable experiences of people within our shared community. This discussion will features senior leadership perspectives and highlight creative approaches to promote equity and inclusion within medical schools. This webinar is presented in partnership with Black in Anatomy – an organization dedicated to creating a safe space to network, uplift, support, and amplify Black contributions to anatomical science.
 

Addressing Microaggressions in Academic Health: A Workshop for Inclusive Excellence | View Recording (registration required)

Health profession schools have acknowledged the need for a diverse workforce by increasing diversity in recruitment, but little has been done to build inclusive excellence in learning environments. Microaggressions and other forms of mistreatment can increase stress levels and depression and negatively impact academic performance. To increase student performance, retention, and wellness, mitigating microaggressions is needed to promote an inclusive culture. The facilitator guide and relevant workshop/course materials are freely available from the AAMC MedEdPORTAL collection to aid in the implementation of this model at other institutions.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Competencies Across the Learning Continuum | View Recording (registration required)

This video includes a brief review of the new AAMC competencies and the longitudinal and inclusive process to develop them. A panel discussed common challenges and exemplary curricula in competency-based education as it relates to diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism.

• Describe the newly released Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) competencies for students, residents, and faculty with a specific focus on some of the less understood concepts;
• Review exemplary curricula and educational practices designed to address racism in medical education; and
• Identify practical strategies to use the DEI competencies to identify gaps in local curricula and educational programs.

Understanding and Addressing Sexual Harassment in Academic Medicine: A New AAMC Report | View Recording (registration required)

This webinar provides an in-depth look at the results from the AAMC's recent publication, Understanding and Addressing Sexual Harassment in Academic Medicine. This webinar will include never-before-seen rates of harassment among faculty across multiple institutions, connections between harassment and engagement and retention, as well as innovative practices to address and prevent harassment from nine qualitative institutional interviews. This report and webinar focuses on gender harassment, the most prevalent but often overlooked, among faculty and explores institutional interventions to prevent these behaviors before they even begin.


Using Inclusive Language in Scholarly Writing | View Recording (registration required)

This video provides a primer for educational scholars who aspire to communication, specifically writing, that is free from bias, inclusive, and accurate in its depiction of identity, health, and risk. Speakers will discuss the principles of using inclusive language across their roles as educators, clinicians, health professions education scholars, and journal reviewers and editors. Speakers also shared available resources and practical strategies that scholars can adopt to align their writing with current best practices around the intentional use of words and descriptors that welcome the diversity of all people and their identities. This webinar concluded with interactive case studies for attendees to practice what they have learned.

Improving the Learning Environment for LGBTQ+ Medical Students | View Recording (registration required)

Due to persistent LGBTQ+ health disparities and negative interactions with the healthcare system, there is significant focus on improving medical education curricula to train medical students and health systems to better care for LGBTQ+ patients. While we focus on improving the experience of LGBTQ+ patients in an inequitable system, less attention has been paid to the experience of LGBTQ+ medical students learning in that same system. The medical school learning environment impacts student's mental health, academic performance, and quality of life. Ensuring an equitable learning environment is critical for the recruitment and retention of diverse students, and student wellbeing.

In this webinar, presenters will discussed current knowledge and gaps about how the medical school learning environment impacts LGBTQ+ medical students. Further, presenters highlighted practices that faculty and leadership at medical schools can employ to improve the learning environment for LGBTQ+ medical students.

Whereas racist research historically has posed the question, “What is wrong with people?” antiracist research asks “What is wrong with policies and systems?” Framing research on race and racism around antiracist questions leads to antiracist narratives, effective policy solutions, and impactful programming that cuts to the root of racial inequality. All researchers can play important roles in shifting the culture of academic medicine to intentionally implement equitable and inclusive policies, set norms for acceptable workplace conduct, develop accurate antiracist curricula, and provide equitable opportunities for mentorship and networking.  

During this session, presenter will discuss how the academic research agenda can be used to promote equity, inclusion, and antiracism. Presenters will highlight promising practices that leaders and researchers can employ to build an antiracist research agenda in medical education as well as the benefits of this work.