UW Health Equity Conference

 

The second annual UW Healthcare Equity Conference was held on May 7th 2019, presented by the Housestaff Quality and Safety Committee and the Network for Underrepresented Residents and Fellows. This was a great opportunity to learn more about the application of QI principles to advance health equity, hear from diverse perspectives, and help design solutions!

The keynote address was delivered by Dr. Leo Morales, MD PhD FACP MPH, Chief Diversity Officer of the UW School of Medicine. Dr. Morales serves as the director of the UW School of Medicine’s Center for Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and co-director of the Latino Center for Health in the School of Public Health. His research has focused on minority health, patient-reported outcomes in diverse populations, and health disparities, including immigrant and Latinx health.

Talks also featured ongoing projects to improve health equity within our system and tools for analyzing healthcare data through a equity lenses from Martine Pierre-Louis, Director of Interpreter Services at Harborview Medical Center, and Amanda Potter, Harborview Operations Specialist. There will be sessions working with faculty, trainees, and students from a wide range of disciplines on specific healthcare equity issues including housing status, race, immigration status, and gender identity.

Interested in learning more about healthcare equity and continuing this work? Take a look at these resources:

  • UW Healthcare Equity includes the UW Healthcare Equity blueprint and annual reports as well as a Healthcare Equity Toolkit with introductions to healthcare equity, glossaries and guides, and further readings on health equity topics
  • The UW Center for Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, led by our keynote speaker Dr. Leo Morales, is a division of the School of Medicine working to promote diversity and inclusiveness throughout the School of Medicine including the WWAMI region, including the wonderful Doctor for a Day program highlighted during the conference.
  • Ethnomed is a fantastic resource from a Harborview and UW partnership, which provides a wide range of information about culture, language, health, illness and community resources directly accessible to health care providers who see patients from different ethnic groups, including handouts and other patient information in a variety of languages
  • The UW School of Public Health hosts a Health Equity Lecture Series featuring national leaders in different areas of health disparities including gender identity & sexual orientation, Indian health, and global health
  • If you want to learn more about our institutional health equity in real time you can look at UW Access to Excellence with equity filters, as expertly shown by our speaker Amanda Potter during the conference (requires AMC login)
    Funding for projects seeking to improve healthcare equity can be obtained from UW Diversity & Inclusion Seed Grants and Housestaff Quality & Safety Committee Project Mini-Grants