Take Action
Professional Societies
Sign up for an account and track your progress against each activity.
1. Commit to Acting for Equity
Commit to taking at least one action from each category.
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Activities
Optional: List actions you or your organization are taking
2. Getting Grounded in History & Your Local Context
Facilitate increasing knowledge among all staff and board members about the history of racism and other forms of oppression (sexism, ableism, classism, ageism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, etc.) at the national, local, and organizational levels.
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Activities
Provide educational and professional development opportunities that equip health care professionals to advance racial justice and health equity
Examine and identify historical and contemporary examples of inequitable harms in national, local, and organizational policies and practices, including reviewing organizational archives
Resources
- IHI TA 104: Building Skills for Anti-Racism Work: Supporting the Journey of Hearts, Minds, and Action
- The Groundwater Approach: Building a practical understanding of structural racism (Free PDF)
- National Health Equity Grand Rounds
- Basics of Health Equity
- American Nurses Association: Our Racial Reckoning Statement
- This statement provides an example of how a professional society acknowledged its own past actions, including those that have negatively impacted nurses of color and perpetuated systemic racism.
- Reckoning with medicine's history of racism
- This short article demonstrates how organizational leadership can reflect critically on the organization's past.
- Equity Matters Video Library
- This extensive course library provides many valuable resources, including examples of organizational self-reflection.
3. Identifying Opportunities for Improvement
Address organization-level contributors to inequitable access to health services (e.g., racist clinical algorithms, inequitable advancement within the specialty).
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Activities
Review all major clinical pathways, algorithms, guidelines etc. to identify those that have caused or perpetuated health inequities in access or outcomes
Resources
- Fact Versus Fiction: Clinical Decision Support Tools and the (Mis)use of Race
- This report from the Congressional Ways and Means Committee provides outstanding background regarding the harmful ways race has been used in clinical algorithms and tools.
4. Taking Initiative
Address organization-level contributors to inequitable access to health services (e.g., racist clinical algorithms, inequitable advancement within the specialty).
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Activities
Address organization-level contributors to inequitable access to health services (e.g., racist clinical algorithms, inequitable advancement within the specialty)
Resources
- New York City Coalition to End Racism in Clinical Algorithms (CERCA) INAUGURAL REPORT
- Review this report to understand the ways that professional societies, health care organizations, public health officials and individual practitioners are working together to advance equity by removing racist clinical algorithms from use.
- ACGME Equity Matters Holistic Recruitment Toolkit
- This practical toolkit provides guidance and strategies for equitable recruitment processes.