Overview
In 2021, the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Phoenix was selected as one of 11 medical schools across the U.S. and Canada to participate in the Anti-Racist Transformation in Medical Education (ARTinMedEd) initiative, a three-year initiative to dismantle institutional racism. Our cohort — which is made up of 15 faculty, staff and students committed to anti-racist transformation at our medical school — has been meeting for a year to begin the change management initiative. We are ready to move into this next phase.
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In the last year, we implemented structural change to begin to transform the institution into one that is anti-racist. A sampling of some of these successes include:
- Securing nearly $500,000 in scholarship funding for students underrepresented in medicine.
- Creating a four-year anti-racist curriculum for all medical students.
- Faculty development on teaching anti-racist medicine.
- Inclusion of anti-racist medicine statement into each clerkship orientation.
We are now in Phase 3 of the initiative, where we will be building our Guiding Coalition. The Guiding Coalition will be made up of faculty, staff, residents, fellows, postdocs and students, and will be responsible for setting direction for anti-racism systems change. The Guiding Coalition will oversee the change projects or actions; identify options and make decisions about where energy and resources should be focused; determine how to hold people accountable and manage resistance; as well as muster support, buy-in and resources from stakeholders and other parts of their institution.