Faculty, residents, trainees and students from Feinberg, the local community and beyond recently came together for Health Equity Week, a weeklong series of educational programming designed to expose the roots of healthcare inequities as well as avenues to address them.
Hosted by the McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University, this year marked the fourth installment of Health Equity Week and featured presentations from healthcare equity leaders from around the country.
“We’re really excited to bring together all of our experts across all our specialties; we have folks in everything from medicine to community engagement. My hope is that each of our participants find ways that they personally can take the lessons learned and implement health equity into their day-to-day practice,” said Linda Suleiman, MD, ‘17 GME, associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion and assistant professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and of Medical Education. Suleiman is one of the original organizers of Health Equity Week.
The event, held February 26 through March 1, featured several virtual sessions and an in-person keynote address.
“Health equity is a non-negotiable,” said Oluwateniola Brown, MD, ‘18 GME, assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the Division of Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery and director for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at McGaw. “Everything we do has to be equity-driven and must have an equity focus.”
Brown, one of the other original organizers of Health Equity Week, introduced this year’s keynote speaker, Erica Taylor, MD, MBA, assistant professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and vice chair of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Duke University School of Medicine.
During her keynote, “Translating Promises to Practice,” Taylor shared her experience building a coalition of trained diversity, equity, and inclusion advocates embedded within each clinical team at Duke Health.
“My goal for our time together is to explore a pathway where we can translate health equity promises and plans to actionable objectives that foster an equitable environment of care,” Taylor said.
Sessions throughout the week focused on topics ranging from understanding lung cancer through an equity lens to building an equitable approach to colorectal cancer screening among Black Americans.
Narjust Florez, MD, associate director of the Cancer Care Equity Program at the Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center, drew attention to the outdated stigmas behind lung cancer and how it often leads to delayed diagnosis of lung cancer in women.
“Lung cancer continues to be seen as a disease of white older men,” Florez said. “Despite all the work that we continue to do, it’s still associated with that demographic, and that affects the diagnosis of women and women of color.”
Following a lung cancer diagnosis, women are more likely to report a drop in self-esteem and are more likely to experience divorce compared to men, which is linked to poorer health outcomes, Florez said.
During a session entitled “Health Equity in Action in Chicago Communities,” Natasha Nichols, MD, assistant professor of Medicine in the Division of Hospital Medicine, detailed how she helped to create Jesse Brown 4 Black Lives, a taskforce at Jesse Brown VA Medical Center designed to address healthcare inequities impacting Black patients.
One of the initiatives Nichols led has created standardized processes for addressing opioid use disorder in Black veterans. Since the initiative began, the number of patients who leave the medical center with medication for opioid use disorder has doubled, she said.
“There’s a lot of work that we’ve been doing in vulnerable population care and trying to understand and help humanize the patients that we take care of,” Nichols said. “We recognize that what happens to them outside of the four walls of our exam room is very relevant and that we need to develop better strategies for addressing this.”