The education workgroup, a subcommittee of Pennsylvania Hospital’s (PAH) Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committee, has been strategizing ways to provide helpful resources about DEI-related topics to staff at the hospital. In addition to offering resources, the group collaborates with other subcommittees through this initiative to inspire further change in the health system. Serving as chair of the hospital’s education workgroup, Karen Alkire, a quality and training specialist, shared her passion for education and learning and how it can be applied to eliminating structural injustice at Penn Medicine and the communities it serves.
Why Did You Join the Education Workgroup?
At the time that they were looking for volunteers, I decided to go back to school to get another master’s degree, but this time in social work. DEI is something that is a tenet of being a social worker. We must be committed to those ideas, but we also must advance those ideas. There’s polarization and division in the world, and a lot of that comes down to a lack of understanding. If we can better understand the root cause of where these disparities and inequities are coming from and how they’re happening, then we can better bridge those gaps and make sure that not only our patients are getting better care, but we are also taking better care of our coworkers who have different backgrounds than us.
What Are the Goals of the Workgroup?
There are two overarching goals. One is to provide education to our clinical and nonclinical staff through a speaker’s forum. This will take the shape of quarterly Grand Rounds presentations on DEI-related topics. The other goal is to provide other opportunities for people to learn outside of these presentations. While some people would want to sit in the Zubrow auditorium and listen to presentations, others may not be able to due to their schedules. They may prefer a different learning tool like a podcast or an article on topics like health equity or historically based inequities in the health care system to learn why we are reevaluating and looking at things differently.
How Does the Group Collaborate With the Hospital’s DEI Steering Committee?
We have monthly meetings to share updates with the other workgroups, but there is also a Microsoft Teams [virtual collaboration] group for the committee. We use the Teams space so individual groups can post their meeting minutes and stay up to date on what the other groups are doing on an ongoing basis. This way we don’t have to wait until the meeting to know what’s happening among the other groups.
Right now, our group has begun working with the research group to help with one of our Grand Rounds. They’re looking at DEI-related research proposals and inquiring about health equity as a potential research outcome at PAH. Some of this research has focused on racial diversity in academic surgery and the influence of race and geographic access to plastic surgeons, in addition to a focus on outcomes for maternal health and female reproductive cancers as a factor of race, economic class, and spoken language. We’re hoping to present some of the preliminary results of that work at the first Grand Rounds. This will present opportunities for changes in clinical processes that are being suggested from this research, which could then result in better outcomes for our patients and staff.