Departmental Plans
Departments within the School of Medicine & Health Sciences have developed their own Multicultural Education plans or follow national efforts specific to their profession.
Department of Family & Community Medicine
Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME)
Standard 3: Academic and Learning Environments: A medical school ensures that its medical education program occurs in professional, respectful, and intellectually stimulating academic and clinical environments, recognizes the benefits of diversity, and promotes students’ attainment of competencies required of future physicians.
3.3 Diversity/Pipeline Programs and Partnerships: A medical school has effective policies and practices in place, and engages in ongoing, systematic, and focused recruitment and retention activities, to achieve mission-appropriate diversity outcomes among its students, faculty, senior administrative staff, and other relevant members of its academic community. These activities include the use of programs and/or partnerships aimed at achieving diversity among qualified applicants for medical school admission and the evaluation of program and partnership outcomes.
Deconstruction:
- Mission-appropriate diversity policy
- School-defined diversity categories for students, faculty, and senior administrative staff (Definition in DCI glossary)
- Diversity categories may differ among, students, faculty, and senior administrative staff
- Policies and practices in place- and appropriate resources deployed- for recruitment, retention, and progress tracking each diversity category
- Demonstration of “effort” through monitoring of outcomes (e.g., numbers of applications/total offers of admission or employment/accepted offers)
- School-or university-based pipeline programs or eternal partnerships to increase the overall pool of medical school applicants in the identified diversity categories: outcome tracking/data on program success
Department of Sports Medicine
Commission on Accreditation of Athletic Training Education (CAATE)
Standard 17: A program’s clinical education component is planned to include clinical practice opportunities with varied client/patient populations. Populations must include clients/patients
- throughout the lifespan (for example, pediatric, adult, elderly),
- of different sexes,
- with different socioeconomic statuses,
- of varying levels of activity and athletic ability (for example, competitive and recreational, individual and team activities, high- and low-intensity activities),
- who participate in nonsport activities (for example, participants in military, industrial, occupational, leisure activities, performing arts).
Annotation: These clinical practice opportunities should occur in athletic training clinical experiences with real clients/patients in settings where athletic trainers commonly practice. When this is not possible, the program may use simulation to meet portions of this standard. Students must have adequate real client/patient interactions (athletic training clinical experiences) to prepare them for contemporary clinical practice with a variety of patient populations.
Standard 56: Advocate for the health needs of clients, patients, communities, and populations. Annotation: Advocacy encompasses activities that promote health and access to health care for individuals, communities, and the larger public.
Standard 57: Identify health care delivery strategies that account for health literacy and a variety of social determinants of health.
Department of Occupational Therapy
Accreditation Council for Occupational Therapy (ACOTE)
The American Occupational Therapy Association, Inc. Vision 2025
As an inclusive profession, occupational therapy maximizes health, well-being, and quality of life for all people, populations, and communities through effective solutions that facilitate participation in everyday living.
Pillars: Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity: We are intentionally inclusive and equitable and embrace diversity in all its forms. (AOTA Diversity & Inclusion Task Force)
AOTA (2018) Accreditation Standards for the Occupational Therapy Program: Diversity (Sections B.1.2, B.1.3., B.2.1., B.3.1., B.4.4., B.4.5., B.4.18., B.5.1.)
Department of Physician Assistant Studies
Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant, Inc. (ARC-PA)
A1.11: The sponsoring institution must demonstrate its commitment to student, faculty and staff diversity and inclusion by:
- supporting the program in defining its goal(s) for diversity and inclusion,
- supporting the program in implementing recruitment strategies,
- supporting the program in implementing retention strategies, and
- making available, resources which promote diversity and inclusion.
Diversity is defined in the glossary as: Differences within and between groups of people that contribute to variations in habits, practices, beliefs and/or values. The inclusion of different people (including but not limited to gender and race/ethnicity, age, physical abilities, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status) in a group or organization. Diversity includes all the ways in which people differ, and it encompasses all the different characteristics that make one individual or group different from another.
Inclusion is defined in the glossary as: The active, intentional and ongoing engagement with diversity in ways that increase awareness, content knowledge, cognitive sophistication and empathic understanding of the complex ways individuals interact within systems and institutions. The act of creating involvement, environments and empowerment in which any individual or group can be and feel welcomed, respected, supported, and valued to fully participate.
Department of Physical Therapy
Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education (CAPTE)
Standard 5: The program recruits, admits and graduates students consistent with the missions and goals of the institution and the program and consistent with societal needs for physical therapy services for a diverse population.
5A: Program policies, procedures, and practices related to student recruitment and admission are based on appropriate and equitable criteria and applicable law, are written and made available to prospective students, and are applied consistently and equitably. Recruitment practices are designed to enhance diversity of the student body.
Public Health Program
Council on Education for Public Health Accreditation (CEPH)
G1. Diversity and Cultural Competence (SPH and PHP)
The school or program defines systematic, coherent and long-term efforts to incorporate elements of diversity. Diversity considerations relate to faculty, staff, students, curriculum, scholarship and community engagement efforts. The school or program also provides a learning environment that prepares students with broad competencies regarding diversity and cultural competence, recognizing that graduates may be employed anywhere in the world and will work with diverse populations. Schools and programs advance diversity and cultural competency through a variety of practices, which may include the following:
- incorporation of diversity and cultural competency considerations in the curriculum
- recruitment and retention of diverse faculty, staff and students
- development and/or implementation of policies that support a climate of equity and inclusion, free of harassment and discrimination
- reflection of diversity and cultural competence in the types of scholarship and/or community engagement conducted
Aspects of diversity may include age, country of birth, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, language, national origin, race, historical under-representation, refugee status, religion, culture, sexual orientation, health status, community affiliation and socioeconomic status. This list is not intended to be exhaustive.
Cultural competence, in this criterion’s context, refers to competencies for working with diverse individuals and communities in ways that are appropriate and responsive to relevant cultural factors. Requisite competencies include self-awareness, open-minded inquiry and assessment and the ability to recognize and adapt to cultural differences, especially as these differences may vary from the school or program’s dominant culture. Reflecting on the public health context, recognizing that cultural differences affect all aspects of health and health systems, cultural competence refers to the competencies for recognizing and adapting to cultural differences and being conscious of these differences in the school or program’s scholarship and/or community engagement.
Department of Medical Laboratory Science
National Accrediting Agency for Clinical Laboratory Sciences (NAACLS)