September 18, 2020
We had a meeting with Pulmonology leadership about the use of race correction factors and population standards with PFT calculations. More updates to come shortly.
September 3, 2020
We met with medical school administration today. Here are some updates:
- The Health Equity Thread is now being staffed at 0.4FTE (up from 0.2FTE) and our Dean allocated $30K to support the thread. There is a robust plan for implementation with amazing lectures lined up for 1st and 2nd year medical students! Thank you Dr. Weena Joshi for your tireless (sometimes uncompensated) work on this. We also want to highlight Naeemah Munir, MD who championed this work when she was a medical student here.
- There is a commitment to automatically interviewing applicants who can provide documentation of citizenship or lineal descent in a federally recognized California Indian Tribe, if they meet minimum screening criteria.
- Regarding Prop 16 implementation: there still isn't a clear plan that has been articulated to us. We are holding our dean of admission accountable for (1) crafting an admissions policy that uses affirmative action in the next month (2) for including students in these discussions.
- According to our dean of admissions, there will be a decision about making the MCAT optional or not in the next few days. We have sent them extensive student testimonies and recommended language from Students for Ethical Admissions about MCAT policy change which they say they will incorporate.
- Anti-racism training should be starting this month for Health Sciences and medical school leadership
- Cystatin C testing is now in house! This gets us one step closer to for using cystatin c for everyone. We are currently waiting on a financial proposal to see how we can make this happen.
- We are meeting with Pulmonology leadership to discuss race based PFT calculations and how to do away with this.
August 13th, 2020
The Anti-Racism Coalition has released the final segment of the HELLA series, a series that took over the University of California, School of Medicine social media platform. The final segment, Hella Uncensored follows a simple conversation between our active BIPOC students who balance the responsibilities of a medical student with commitment of a social activist in medicine. We encourage you to sit down with your friends and colleagues to watch as the Anti-Racism Coalition discusses the hard topics of professional, academic, and emotional sacrifice in the wake of anti-racism activism.
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July 21, 2020
Housestaff representatives met with UCSD Health leadership. They are actively looking for external agencies to conduct audits of each level of our institution to identify what needs to be done to make UCSD an antiracist institution. They will be implementing an anti-racist Task Force which will consist of UCSD faculty, leadership, as well as UCSD housestaff and medical students. Applications will be sent out soon for all those who are interested in serving on this Task Force. Leadership recognized the importance of transparency in regards in their anti-racist efforts, especially when it comes to recruitment of URiM housestaff. We requested that this recruitment season residencies and fellowship programs are more transparent about the number of URiM being interviewed this year in order to identify potential areas of improvement.
The Pediatric Resident Diversity Collaborative has now had 3 meetings with residency leadership and Rady Children's Hospital leadership. Leadership will be creating a Rady Children's Task Force that will collaborate with the UCSD Task Force. Leadership is also creating a new Associate Program Director of Diversity position, is taking a hard look at all steps in the resident recruitment process to significantly improve our URiM representation, and will soon start working with Jones Inclusive consulting firm to objectively identify systemic sources of racism in our institution and receive expertly led anti-racism training from them. The housestaff will meet with UCSD Health and Rady Children's leadership on a monthly basis moving forward.
The Pediatric Resident Diversity Collaborative has now had 3 meetings with residency leadership and Rady Children's Hospital leadership. Leadership will be creating a Rady Children's Task Force that will collaborate with the UCSD Task Force. Leadership is also creating a new Associate Program Director of Diversity position, is taking a hard look at all steps in the resident recruitment process to significantly improve our URiM representation, and will soon start working with Jones Inclusive consulting firm to objectively identify systemic sources of racism in our institution and receive expertly led anti-racism training from them. The housestaff will meet with UCSD Health and Rady Children's leadership on a monthly basis moving forward.
July 10, 2020
Medical student representatives from the ARC met with Health Sciences leadership. Leadership has also agreed to conduct an external audit of our institution to identify gaps and goals geared at making UCSD anti-racist. An anti-racism Task Force will be established to make recommendations and devise solutions, largely based on gaps identified through this external audit. Health Sciences has committed to allocating a budget for the solutions proposed by the Task Force. On the administrative side, Health Sciences is beginning recruitment for new Assistant Vice Chancellor and Chief Administrative Officer for Anti-Racism and EDI positions; the ARC will be involved in formulating job descriptions for these positions and interviewing candidates. We received a verbal commitment regarding several of our medical student demands, but have asked for further meetings to get a real commitment to increasing FTE allocation for PRIME and the Heath Equity thread, and establishment of a scholarship program for Black medical students within the next year.
July 1, 2020
Representatives from the ARC met with Councilmember Barbara Bry (District 1) to share our demands and goals. She was supportive of our initiatives and we will continue to partner with her to ensure our demands are met.
June 30, 2020
We've started conversations with leadership from nephrology to remove the race coefficient from GFR calculations. We have discussed removing creatinine altogether and using cystatin c based GFR calculations. There are upcoming meetings with nephrology pharmacy, public health, and laboratory medicine, to determine the best way to do this, and to anticipate and prepare for downstream effects.
June 29, 2020
We have confirmed a meeting with Health Sciences leadership for July 10, 2020
June 23, 2020
While we haven't been able to schedule an in person meeting with our leadership, we did send them our preliminary responses and concerns today, we're hoping for a speedy response.
Medical Student Responses to Leadership |
Housestaff Comments |
June 15, 2020
We got a response to our demands from UC San Diego Health and Rady Children's Hospital leadership. While there is a lot of promise in their responses, we will need to talk in person with our leaders to ensure all of the actions they take are framed in anti-racism principles and that we don't fall into the trap of focusing on equity, diversity, and inclusion. We will be posting our annotations to their response shortly.
We are also actively scheduling meetings with our elected officials to discuss our mission and garner support for police abolition.
We are also actively scheduling meetings with our elected officials to discuss our mission and garner support for police abolition.
June 11, 2020
Student council was able to secure some funding to kick off an anti-racism book club! More to come with additional sources of funding.
June 10, 2020
We made it to the C-suite! We were invited to join the CEO's weekly town halls with the health system which averages about 2300 participants. We had a great conversation about racism in medicine and look forward to continuing this work with the bold and transformative leaders at UC San Diego Health.
https://pulse.ucsd.edu/coronavirus/Pages/COVID-19_CEO_Town_Hall-6.10.2020.aspx
https://pulse.ucsd.edu/coronavirus/Pages/COVID-19_CEO_Town_Hall-6.10.2020.aspx
June 7, 2020
We hosted a call to action event at all of our campuses: Jacobs, Hillcrest, Rady, and the VA/School of Medicine. At the medical school, over 200 participants joined in community, committing to hold UCSD accountable for becoming an anti-racist institution. Major thank you to Ana Skomal for capturing this event so beautifully
June 5, 2020
Today, we sent a call to action to UC San Diego Health and Rady Children's Hospital, challenging them to become anti-racist institutions in a meaningful way that includes the redistribution of funds, redistribution of power, and rigorous anti-racist training starting with top leadership.
Tracking Tool
https://trello.com/b/DmQZgxhn/anti-racism-demands