H01 – Developing Anti-Racist Integrated Care Professionals: A Model for the Dissemination of Higher Education Curricula Across Health Professionals

Summary

Research has long since documented increased patient satisfaction when working with race-concordant providers (Laveist & Nuru-Jeter, 2002), and it’s been predicted that Black doctors may reduce the gap in Black male cardiovascular mortality by 19% (Alsan, Garrick, & Graziani, 2019); however, the diversity of our workforce is not consistent with that of the general population. In 2015, 86% of psychologists in the U.S. were white, while only 4% were Black/African American, and 5% Latinx (Lin, Stamm, & Christidis, 2018); similarly only 5% of the physician and 3.9% of the physician assistant workforce is Black (AAMC, 2019; National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants, 2015). As we strive to create a more diverse workforce, it is imperative to identify a framework in higher education to address these disparities. Many in higher education are optimistic that the syndemics of COVID-19 and systematic racism, coupled with the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement, may represent an inflection point for higher education systems to make policy and structural changes to better support underrepresented minority students. And yet these same systems are notoriously complex, and change is often slow. As parallel efforts unfold to diversify student bodies and promote anti-racist research agendas, critical attention must be paid to the development and dissemination of academic curricula on implicit bias, health inequity, and social justice in order to support the development of culturally responsive, anti-racist integrated behavioral health providers. While it is evident that individual initiatives are occurring independently, such as the Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine recently adding implemented implicit bias training in their first two weeks of year one curricula (Reddy et al., 2020), singular efforts are insufficient to impact the scale of educational programs necessary to affect widespread workforce changes. Implementation science may provide unique insights into how to address these challenges (e.g., diffusion of innovations, RE-AIM, model fidelity; Brownson, Colditz, & Proctor, 2017). Arizona State University recently completed a three year, SAMHSA-funded grant aimed at training diverse health professionals across disparate academic units (e.g., psychologists, social workers, nurse practitioners, and doctors of behavioral health). While content focused on screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment (SBIRT), the model for rapid development, implementation, and dissemination of curricula across these programs was successful among trained faculty and curricula content was sustained in more than 90% of infused courses at the close of the grant period (Lindsey et al., 2021). We propose that this model may be adapted for the purposes of disseminating critical curricula aimed at the development of anti-racist integrated care providers.