Family Medicine Residency Greenville - Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

As health care providers who have the privilege to shape the lives of the families we treat and the communities we serve, it is our responsibility to be empowered agents of meaningful change. Through the medical care we provide, the curriculum we teach, the research we conduct, and the culture we promote, we commit to stemming the tide of racism and discrimination and uniting behind a common call of being anti-racist and anti-discriminatory.

Medicine is no exception to long-standing injustice and division. We recognize that change must begin from within. We are taking the following steps to promote this necessary change:

Recruitment

As a program, we believe that intersectional diversity in residents, faculty, and staff adds invaluable perspective to intellectual discourse and leads to excellence in patient care. We recognize that there are groups who have historically been excluded from medicine, and we are committed to taking meaningful steps toward dismantling this history. We are actively working to recruit diverse individuals to become members of our team.

• We have adjusted our resident recruitment process to more formally employ a holistic approach consistent with AAMC recommendations that take into account an applicant’s experiences, attributes, competencies, and metrics.
• We are working to diminish implicit bias in the recruitment process by standardizing anchors to behavioral interview questions and requiring that all members of the recruitment committee participate in an implicit bias training refresher course.
• We are working to increase our presence at a variety of conferences and recruitment events to intentionally raise awareness about the program to applicants who have historically been excluded from medicine.
• We have implemented an optional method for applicants to disclose life experiences that would bring value and diversity to the program to the recruitment faculty only. We are working to use this and other data to improve our tracking of “diversity and distance traveled” metrics among applicants to better understand our progress in meeting our recruitment goals.

Patient Care

In our work with patients and clinical teaching, we strive to appreciate the unique biopsychosocial context of each individual patient and integrate this information to provide equitable, compassionate, patient-centered, evidence-based, and high-quality care.

• We care for a diverse patient population in our Center for Family Medicine. All patients are screened for social determinants of health using a validated screening tool embedded in the EMR, and patients are provided with targeted referrals using an innovative program called NowPow. Providers also work with our in-house social worker to help provide resources to patients. For example, our clinic provides boxes of low-cost fresh produce to patients through the Food Share program. The Center for Family Medicine is working to develop quality improvement projects to address additional social determinants of health and standardize clinic processes to eliminate disparities in care.
• We continue to work to provide opportunities to treat different types of patients in unique community settings including the Mobile Health Clinic (serving underinsured and uninsured patients in the community), Detention Center (serving individuals who are incarcerated), and providing home visits for patients with barriers to in-clinic care. All residents also receive formal clinical training in caring for LGBTQ+ individuals and recently resettled refugees during dedicated clinics at the Center for Family Medicine. Many faculty and residents also volunteer their time in the Greenville Free Clinic.
• We are currently working to create a patient advisory committee that accurately reflects the diversity of our clinic population to provide feedback to clinic leadership to improve the patient experience.

Curriculum

We continue to adapt our curriculum in order to help residents understand and address the broader societal and healthcare system patterns that differentially impact people’s health.

• We have been actively incorporating new curriculum content related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion over the past 2 years. Curriculum changes include didactics on cultural humility and weight bias, a resident-led Health Equity Morbidity and Mortality conference, literature review on race-based algorithms in medicine and review on the implications towards patient care, independent learning on advocacy in Family Medicine, and a book club on the book “So You Want to Talk About Race” by Ijeoma Oluo.
• We are working to implement a diversity and health disparities checklist that every faculty didactic presenter will complete prior to teaching.  

Culture

We do not tolerate any racist or other discriminatory behavior. We also strive to promote a learning environment of openness and curiosity, where learners feel safe to be honest and vulnerable as they engage in personal growth. We believe that inclusion is a critical element for successfully achieving and maintaining diversity. Our goal is to cultivate an environment that fosters belonging, respect, and value for all. We hope to achieve this goal by nurturing the inclusive climate and culture of the program through professional development, education, policy, and practice.

• The residents and faculty are engaging in professional development in diversity and inclusion; for example, we participated in an Upstander Training that provides guidance for managing microaggressions that occur in the clinical learning environment.
• We aim to hold ourselves accountable to these goals by surveying the trainees using the validated Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised.
• The Prisma Health Graduate Medical Education office offers a confidential process for reporting microaggressions or other instances where trainees experience discrimination. These reports are investigated and taken seriously by Prisma Health leadership.
• We regularly engage in community service as a program (e.g., cooking dinner at the Ronald McDonald House, providing free sports physicals at local high schools, participating in the Walk with a Doc program). We are consistently working to increase our service and advocacy efforts as a program.

We are committed to consistently reflecting and challenging ourselves and our program to do our best to contribute to change in all areas of our work. Please review the following links for more information and feel free to reach out to us with additional questions via email FMResidencyGreenville@prismahealth.org.