The Association of Black Cardiologists is creating an annual ranking to assess academic cardiovascular training programs' diversity and inclusion efforts, the organization said Dec 1.
The Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Scorecard will use a three-tier rating system to identify programs' efforts as poor, at-risk or excellent based on four main metrics:
- Number of general cardiology fellowship members who identify with racial and ethnic groups that are underrepresented in medicine.
- Change in the number of fellows over the training program's life cycle
- Trainees' assessment of how welcome they feel in the program
- Total number of faculty members who identify with racial and ethnic groups that are underrepresented in medicine.
The initiative aims to create a more diverse and inclusive cardiology workforce, which in turn could help eliminate care disparities that disproportionately affect communities of color, the association said.
"The problem with academic medicine in many ways is that if I time-traveled back a hundred years, it looks pretty much how it looks now," Karol Watson, MD, PhD, director of the cardiovascular medicine fellowship program at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine in Los Angeles, said in a news release. "People tend to hire themselves over and over, so we need to get people to understand how important diversity is and get buy-in from the community. It has to be everyone's responsibility, not just African Americans, to bring all of us along."
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