Baylor launches racial justice plan for health disparities
Baylor College of Medicine has launched an initiative, the culmination of campus discussions since the killing of George Floyd, aimed at overcoming public health disparities that cause minorities to shoulder a greater burden of COVID-19 and other diseases.
The initiative, touted as a strengthening of its commitment to racial justice as a means to improve public health, calls for the elite Houston college to better recruit and retain minorities, bring STEM education to more minorities, educate staff about structural racism and develop strategies to enroll more minorities in clinical trials.
“We are hopeful that this commitment really galvanizes our community,” said Dr. Toi Harris, Baylor associate provost of institutional diversity, inclusion and equity. “It’s a significant step across the college, coming together in this moment of national unrest to make an impact.”
The initiative follows statements by a number of national medical groups, such as the Association of American Medical Colleges, about racism’s “adverse impact on the health of Black Americans and others across (similar) socioeconomic lines.”
In addition, Baylor President Dr. Paul Klotman has made racism and health care the subject of a number of the weekly video messages he has taped since the pandemic changed life in Houston. In one, he drew parallels between the threat posed by the two forces.
“Systemic injustice and racism is equally a problem,” Klotman
said after talking about the coronavirus. “It’s just as likely to wipe us out as a society as COVID-19 is to wipe us out as a species. We have to take both equally seriously. These are existential threats to us and our way of life.”
Klotman made those comments soon after the police killing of Floyd, a longtime Houstonian whose May death at the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis triggered global outrage. A few days later, more than 1,000 Houston healthcare professionals and students gathered for a vigil at Hermann Park Reflection Pool — White Coats for Black Lives — where they stood in silence to protest police violence.
The new Baylor initiative was put together by its Office of Institutional Diversity, Inclusion and Equity and Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy, then approved by the college’s leadership and board of trustees.
In a position paper about the initiative, the authors wrote that Black and Hispanic doctors and scientists “do not have the same access to quality mentoring, successful research opportunities or pathways to promotion that their white counterparts do, and they face more structural barrier.”
They also wrote that “evidence suggests a correlation between implicit racial bias and disparities in healthcare due to the influence of negative racial bias on physician clinical decision making, quality of patient care, patient health outcomes and patient satisfaction.”