1. EDI Lunch Talks
- Monthly lunch talks coordinated by a medical student featuring a leader in the community/medicine/or relevant fields
- Results: empowering students to deliver medical care through an equity, diversity and inclusion lens
- Results: student collaboration and networking with faculty, patients and professionals passionate about EDI advocacy
2024/2025 Lead: Aakankshya Kharel
2. Gender-Inclusive Spaces:
- Katz all-gender bathrooms: advocacy and follow up with Dr. Lewis over several months regarding signage changes and renovations
- Results: signage changes indicating all-gender washrooms - renovations scheduled for summer and fall 2023; larger university-wide pilot project for renovations across campus
- AHS all-gender bathrooms: started a collaboration with AHS EDI and communications folks to develop a map/list of gender inclusive bathrooms and changing spaces in AHS facilities
- All-gender changing spaces: installed a privacy curtain in overflow/gender-inclusive locker room; scrubs receptacle installed
3. Multi-Faith Prayer Space:
- Ramadan 2022: partnered with IMDSA and IHIP to share Indigenous meeting space
- Ramadan 2023: in the process of finding a (permanent) space for Ramadan 2023; potential approval of a temporary DL room for midday prayers
- Ongoing talks at the college of health-sciences level to secure a space
4. MSA Health Equity Conference:
- Identified EDI-related gaps in MD program curriculum and conceptualized an annual Health Equity Conference to address these limitations
- Recruited a team of conference leads
- Supported the conference leads in the organization of the first (theme: migrant, refugee, and newcomer health) and second (theme: disability and neurodiversity) MSA Health Equity Conferences
- Partnered with faculty and the Refugee Health Coalition to advocate for curricular change and instructional time on this important underrepresented subject area
- Secured funding for the conference from grants and community partners
- In the process of applying for funding and recruiting a team for the 2024 Health Equity Conference
5. Trauma Informed Care (TIC):
- Began with advocacy meetings with various faculty members to pitch the importance of TIC and gain interest
- Worked with fellow student leaders to plan and run a successful TIC panel event that later became a model for a formal curricular panel event for second-year students
- Collaborated with faculty members to plan and roll-out the TIC curriculum
- Initiated a collaboration with faculty and colleagues to undertake research related to the role out of the TIC curriculum – submitted abstract to AMEE 2023
- Created a list of TIC "do’s and don’ts" for MD students for OSCEs
6. EDI Curricular Reporting Form:
- Collaborated with faculty to determine the appropriate process for delivering feedback to block coordinators/lecturers about EDI-related concerns that arise in various curricular components
- Navigated challenges and barriers to implementation ultimately resulting in the successful development of a collaborative project with program faculty
- Created end-of-block reports for each blocks and submitted them to the faculty for discussion at end-of-block meetings
- Created summary reports for distribution to students
- Created an EDI checklist for lecturers based on common themes from the reporting form
- Faculty indicated interest rolling out a similar form process in the clerkship program
7. Standardized Patient Program:
- Advocated for increased diversity in the standardized patients that are used for physical exams and OSCEs, by meeting with folks from the standardized patient program
8. MD Admissions:
- Met with Dr. Stovel to learn about the EDI-related initiatives involved in admissions and gave feedback about the admissions process from an EDI student perspective
9. Multi-Faith Diversity Calendar:
- Advocated for and developed a multi-faith diversity calendar that was provided to the faculty so that they can avoid scheduling mandatory in-person sessions on important dates in different religions and cultures
10. Psychological Safety:
- Inclusion of questions to assess psychological safety of small-group learning environments on evaluation forms in response to student feedback
- Initial roll-out was in DL forms, but we have advocated for this to be included in all small-group evaluation forms - this was later implemented
