Careers

Building Bridges

The Vision

Transforming health care for everyone inspired, Building Bridges by WAFP. This initiative helps you confront health disparities to improve the health of all people. You’ll find education and resources to advocate for health equity, promote workforce diversity, and collaborate with other disciplines and organizations to advance health equity.

Time to Act: A Podcast About Diversity and Inclusion

CEOs and C-suite leaders from multinational brands and regional businesses reveal why diversity and inclusion are defining factors in a company’s growth and success at scale. It's more than checking the boxes — together, business leaders are listening, understanding and taking action for real change.

For a deeper dive into corporate diversity and inclusion in action, visit HuffPost.

Presented by PwC and CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion™. Produced by RYOT Studio and At Will Media.

CMS Disparities Impact Statement Tool

This tool can be used by all health care stakeholders to achieve health equity for racial and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, sexual and gender minorities, individuals with limited English proficiency, and rural populations. While the tool is developed for organizations, it can also be valuable to help you in your individual efforts to achieve health equity. 

The tool is broken down into five simple steps

  1. Identify health disparities and priority populations
  2. Define your goals
  3. Establish your organization's  health equity strategy
  4. Determine what your organization needs to implement its strategy
  5. Monitory and evaluate your progress

The Disparities Impact Statement Tool is one of a variety of quality improvement and interventions tools that are available through the CMS Office of Minority Health. Visit their website for a wealth of information and helpful tools to help you provide quality care for and improve the health of people from all minority populations.

Project Implicit

Project Implicit is a non-profit organization and international, collaborative network of researchers investigating implicit social cognition, or thoughts and feelings that are largely outside of conscious awareness and control. Project Implicit is the product of a team of scientists whose research produced new ways of understanding attitudes, stereotypes, and other hidden biases that influence perception, judgment, and action. Our researchers and collaborators translate that academic research into practical applications for addressing diversity, improving decision-making, and increasing the likelihood that practices are aligned with personal and organizational values.

 

Project Implicit offers a series of Implicit Association Tests (IAT) that are designed to help you discover you own implicit biases by measuring the strength of association between concepts. The purpose of the Project Implicit website is to educate about implicit bias. They give feedback on Implicit Association Test (IAT) performance to raise awareness and encourage self-reflection. When taking an IAT you are asked to quickly sort words into categories that are on the left- and right-hand side of the computer screen by pressing the “e” key if the word belongs to the category on the left and the “i” key if the word belongs to the category on the right. The IAT has five main parts.

 

You can learn more about and participate in a series of IAT’s on the Project Implicit website.

Tour for Diversity in Medicine

Conceived by former medical student leaders, Tour for Diversity in Medicine is a grassroots effort to educate, inspire, and cultivate future minority physicians and dentists. Current trends in racial and ethnic health care disparities are widely documented and a major focus of many recent federal and state health policy changes. One frequently discussed solution is the need to increase the number of minority providers.

Health Disparities and Equity

Healthcare disparities are defined by the Institute of Medicine as “racial or ethnic differences in the quality of healthcare that are not due to access-related factors or clinical needs, preferences, and appropriateness of intervention.”  Health care disparities have significant economic consequences for the health care system, and in turn, for the business of medicine.

How to Identify, Understand, and Unlearn Implicit Bias in Patient Care

Implicit bias is the unconscious collection of stereotypes and attitudes that we develop toward certain groups of people, which can affect our patient relationships and care decisions. You can overcome implicit bias by first discovering your blind spots and then actively working to dismiss stereotypes and attitudes that affect your interactions. While individual action is helpful, organizations and institutions must also work to eliminate systemic problems.

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