Madison Residency Team Members: Top row L to R: Justin Sena, Tressa Spingler, Dan Samuelson, Dillon Novak, Jenny White, Danielle Eithun, Katy Bixby; Bottom row L to R: Associate Program Director Billy Michael, MD; Program Director Ildi Martonffy, MD; Associate Program Directors Jensi Carlson, MD and Tom Hahn, MD.
The DFMCH Residency Big Team recently completed 28 modules designed to help UW Health employees better understand their roles in facilitating diverse, equitable, and inclusive spaces and create an ongoing and sustainable culture of inclusion.
The team meets twice a month to discuss residency operations, curriculum, and accreditation requirements. In July 2020, they added the UW Health Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Microlearning Modules to the agenda. The modules, covering topics ranging from understanding culture to the history of racism in healthcare, rely on peer facilitators to moderate the sessions which include worksheets, videos, and discussion questions.
“Participating in the microlearning modules contributes to the residency program’s overall goals of recruiting and retaining diverse residents who reflect the diversity of the patients we care for,” said Jenny White, education coordinator for the Madison Residency Program.
Incorporating the training into already scheduled meetings allowed the team to immerse themselves in the topics over a long period of time and required little preparation, though participants could review the content on their own before meetings.
“We hope that we will be able to take what we learned and apply it to our work, for instance by applying an equity lens to some of our policies and by thinking about our approach to resident and staff recruitment,” added Tom Hahn, MD, associate program director for the Madison Residency Program. “We plan to carve out time during our meetings at least monthly to do some of this work and to continue discussions on DEI topics that we want to further explore.”
Naomi Takahashi,LCSW, director and program coordinator for UW Health DEI, designed the modules which have been available to UW Health employees since 2018. She hopes to have them available to all faculty and staff in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health by the end of the year. The vision of the microlearning series is to build capacity for various groups across the UW Health system to embed DEI discussions and strengthen employees’ common purpose around DEI initiatives.
“The five segments are part of an ongoing journey necessary to continue to embed DEI discussions into your day to day at UW Health,” said Takahashi. “The hoped-for outcome behind using these resources is that they will help build the muscle necessary for us to engage in the discomfort required to interrupt racist behaviors in ourselves, in our system, and in our community.”
Learn more about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training at DFMCH and UW Health.
Published: March 2022