Internal medicine organizations sponsor grant to support diversity

The American College of Physicians (ACP) and four other organizations have announced their co-sponsorship of a grant seeking to support innovations in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

According to a news release, the organizations sponsoring the grant are the ACP, the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine (AAIM), the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), the ABIM Foundation, the American College of Physicians (ACP) and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. It is open to internal medicine residents and seeks to support projects designed to promote trust and create a more equitable healthcare system by incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusion into the fabric of internal medicine education and training.

As it stands now, graduates from U.S. medical schools are disproportionately likely to be white. Only 6.2 percent of U.S. medical school graduates were Black and 5.3 were Hispanic in 2019. Additionally, research shows that creating environments that promote these principles benefits medical professionals and the diverse patients they serve, the release says.

The sponsors are seeking proposals that address the relationship between trust and issues of bias and diversity at the patient/physician, team, and health system levels. The request for application can be found here, and letters of intent are due Dec. 10. Selected applicants will be invited to submit full proposals early next year and the grants will be awarded in spring 2021. The total of the grants is $300,000, and will include awards at the $20,000, $5,000, and $2,500 levels, the release says.

“This program is designed both to improve the quality of internal medicine education and training and to create a more trustworthy health system that serves everyone,” Richard A. Baron, MD, president and CEO of the ABIM and the ABIM Foundation, says in the release. “Trust is essential to a successful health system. Finding creative ways to help internal medicine physicians build a more inclusive and equitable system can help engender trust among those with justifiable mistrust.”

The release has a list of successful projects, it includes:

• Innovations in medical education and training that incorporate DEI best practices
• Quality improvement programs designed to improve health equity, including through interdisciplinary teams
• Approaches for health systems and hospitals to demonstrate cultural competence and empathy
• Innovative approaches to create collaborative partnerships between health systems and community-based service organizations in underserved communities