From the "top-down" and the "bottom-up": Centering Foucault's notion of biopower and individual accountability within systemic racism

How Might we Build an Equitable Future? Design Justice, a Counternarrative to Dominant Approaches in Medical Education

PHENOMENON

Marginalized individuals in medicine face many structural inequities which can have enduring consequences on their progress. Therefore, inequity must be addressed by dismantling underlying unjust policies, environments, and curricula. However, once these injustices have been taken apart, how do we build more just systems from the rubble? Many current strategies to address this question have foundational values of urgency, solutionism, and top-down leadership.

APPROACH

This paper explores a counternarrative: Design Justice. As a set of guiding principles, Design Justice centers the experiences and perspectives of marginalized individuals and communities. These principles include mutual accountability and transparency, co-ownership, and community-led outcomes, and honoring local, traditional, Indigenous knowledge.

FINDINGS

Rooted in critical scholarship and critical design, Design Justice recognizes the interconnectedness of various forms of marginalization and works to critically examine power dynamics that exist in every design process. These co-created principles act as practical guardrails, directing progress toward justice.

INSIGHTS

This paper begins with an overview of Design Justice's history in critical scholarship and critical design, providing foundational background knowledge for medical educators, scholars, and leaders in key concepts of justice and design. We explore how the Design Justice principles were developed and have been applied across sectors, highlighting its applications, including education applications. Finally, we raise critical questions about medical education prompted by Design Justice.

Exploring the implicit meanings of 'cultural diversity': a critical conceptual analysis of commonly used approaches in medical education

Existing approaches to cultural diversity in medical education may be implicitly based on different conceptualisations of culture. Research has demonstrated that such interpretations matter to practices and people concerned. We therefore sought to identify the different conceptualisations espoused by these approaches and investigated their implications for education. We critically reviewed 52 articles from eight top medical education journals and subjected these to a conceptual analysis. Via open coding, we looked for references to approaches, their objectives, implicit notions of culture, and to implementation practices. We iteratively developed themes from the collected findings. We identified several approaches to cultural diversity teaching that used four different ways to conceptualise cultural diversity: culture as 'fixed patient characteristic', as 'multiple fixed characteristics', as 'dynamic outcome impacting social interactions', and as 'power dynamics'. We discussed the assumptions underlying these different notions, and reflected upon limitations and implications for educational practice. The notion of 'cultural diversity' challenges learners' communication skills, touches upon inherent inequalities and impacts how the field constructs knowledge. This study adds insights into how inherent inequalities in biomedical knowledge construction are rooted in methodological, ontological, and epistemological principles. Although these insights carry laborious implications for educational implementation, educators can learn from first initiatives, such as: standardly include information on patients' multiple identities and lived experiences in case descriptions, stimulate more reflection on teachers' and students' own values and hierarchical position, acknowledge Western epistemological hegemony, explicitly include literature from diverse sources, and monitor diversity-integrated topics in the curriculum.

Accounting for agency in structural competency

To emphasize to learners how factors outside individual control impact health, scholars introduced the concept of structural competency. Structural competency refers to the development of analytical skills that reveal the larger societal context beyond the patient-clinician interaction that shapes health outcomes. The growing adoption of structural competency curricula, however, has revealed that prelicensure and early career health professionals can feel overwhelmed by the mismatch between the wide scale of entrenched problems and the limited scope of their therapeutic skills. In this Reflections paper, I draw on theories from Giddens, Bourdieu, and Foucault to restore a role for individual agency in promoting health. Conceiving of structure and agency as mutually constituting suggests that structures are human-made and can be vulnerable to challenge. Structures, however, disperse power to such an extent that people internalize their rules and discipline themselves to follow them without explicit enforcement. It is precisely in those local sites of power that health professions learners and educators can intervene to interrupt the reproduction of structures harmful to health. As I demonstrate with an example from a reproductive health emergency, being structurally competent may also include contesting agreed upon norms at the level of the learning and clinical environments rather than only macro-level societal forces. Rewriting norms within health professions education and clinical practice is not necessarily a simpler task, but it provides learners and educators with more accessible targets for action.

An end to the "muffin meeting": Conceptualizing power and navigating tokenism in patient engagement for health leaders

Patient engagement is emerging as a priority for Canadian health leaders. Alongside the proliferation of patient engagement efforts in healthcare organizations and networks, awareness that tokenism can potentially occur within such efforts, as well as strategies to mitigate it, are gaining increased attention. While many actions associated with more tokenistic forms of patient engagement have been identified, this article posits there is a need to pay critical attention to the concept and role of power in enabling these actions in the first place. Of particular importance is how power and knowledge work to shape healthcare organizations and can create unequal relations with the patients they seek to engage. Drawing on the literature, this article serves as a theoretical roadmap for health leaders to think critically about power, as well as a set of prompts that can be used to reflexively consider their role in navigating power dynamics in the context of patient engagement efforts. This article contends that building awareness of power is a critical step for health leaders and organizations and that navigating power differences is a necessary leadership competency for engaging patients in decision-making throughout all stages of healthcare improvement and organizational change efforts.

Inequity is woven into the fabric: a discourse analysis of assessment in pediatric residency training

Intrinsic inequity in assessment refers to sources of harmful discrimination inherent in the design of assessment tools and systems. This study seeks to understand intrinsic inequity in assessment systems by studying assessment policies and associated procedures in residency training, using general pediatrics as a discourse case study. Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) was conducted on assessment policy and procedure documents. Two authors independently prepared structured analytic notes using guiding questions. Documents and respective analytic notes were subsequently reviewed independently by all authors. Each author prepared further unstructured analytic notes on the documents' discourse. The authors then compared notes and constructed truth statements (i.e., interpretations of what the discourse establishes as true about the construct under study) and sub-strands (i.e., themes) that were repeated and legitimized across the documents via iterative discussion. Based on analysis, the authors constructed two truth statements. These truth statements, "good assessment is equitable assessment," and "everyone is responsible for inequity," conceptualized inequity in assessment as an isolated or individual-level aberration in an otherwise effective or neutral system. Closer examination of the truth statements and sub-strands in the discourse presented an alternative view, suggesting that inequity may in fact not be an aberration but rather an inherent feature of assessment systems.

The Problem and Power of Professionalism: A Critical Analysis of Medical Students' and Residents' Perspectives and Experiences of Professionalism

PURPOSE

Professionalism has historically been viewed as an honorable code to define core values and behaviors of physicians, but there are growing concerns that professionalism serves to control people who do not align with the majority culture of medicine. This study explored how learners, particularly those from historically marginalized groups, view the purpose of professionalism and how they experience professionalism as both an oppressive and valuable force.

METHOD

The authors conducted a qualitative study with a critical orientation. In 2021 and 2022, they interviewed fourth-year medical students and senior residents at 3 institutions about their perceptions and experiences of professionalism. After cataloguing participants' stories, the authors combined critical theory with narrative and thematic analysis to identify mechanisms by which professionalism empowered or disempowered individuals or groups based on identities.

RESULTS

Forty-nine trainees (31 medical students and 18 senior residents from multiple specialties) participated in interviews; 17 identified as a race/ethnicity underrepresented in medicine and 15 as people of color not underrepresented in medicine. Their stories, especially those of participants underrepresented in medicine, identified professionalism as an oppressive, homogenizing force that sometimes encoded racism through various mechanisms. These mechanisms included conflating differences with unprofessionalism, enforcing double standards of professionalism, and creating institutional policies that regulated appearance or hindered advocacy. Participants described deleterious consequences of professionalism on their learning and mental health. However, participants also described useful aspects of professionalism as a means of advocating for marginalized groups. Additionally, participants described how they reconceived professionalism to include their own identities and values.

CONCLUSIONS

Trainees, especially those from historically marginalized groups, experience professionalism as a restrictive, assimilative force while also finding value in and constructive adaptations for professionalism. Understanding both the destructive and empowering aspects of professionalism on individual and institutional levels can help improve the framing of professionalism in medical education.

"This shouldn't be our job to help you do this": exploring the responses of medical schools across Canada to address anti-Black racism in 2020

BACKGROUND

Protests against police brutality and anti-Black racism were catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd and other Black and racialized people in spring 2020. Addressing anti-Black racism had been historically minimized as an institutional priority across Canadian medical schools, but many swiftly released statements broadly condemning racism. Given that little has been documented about how institutions are responding with action, we sought to explore Black medical students' and senior faculty perspectives on Canadian medical schools' efforts to address anti-Black racism in 2020.

METHODS

We conducted a qualitative, instrumental case study, grounded in critical race theory. We recruited Black medical students and deans (or delegated senior faculty administrators) and we conducted virtual, individual, semi-structured interviews with participants between Oct. 5, 2020, and Jan. 16, 2021. Interviews were transcribed and iteratively analyzed through inductive and deductive techniques.

RESULTS

We interviewed 19 participants, including 8 medical students (6 in pre-clerkship; all of whom identified as Black) and 11 senior faculty administrators (4 deans, 7 delegate faculty administrators; 3 racialized). We had at least 1 student or faculty participant from 13 medical schools, and no student or faculty participants from the 4 medical schools in Quebec. Nearly all represented medical schools were described as "starting from scratch" in their responses, having previously failed to acknowledge or address anti-Black racism. In the absence of diverse faculty leaders, participants indicated that medical schools primarily relied on Black medical students to drive institutional responses, unfairly burdening students during an already difficult period. At the time of the interviews, a range of initiatives were in the planning stages or underway, and were largely related to admissions and curriculum reform.

INTERPRETATION

We found that medical schools relied heavily on Black medical students to inform and drive their institutional responses related to anti-Black racism in 2020, which these students found burdensome. Medical schools lacked intrinsic capacity because of the paucity of Black faculty - a direct result of historical and ongoing structural anti-Black racism in medicine. Institutional accountability remains critical, and further research is needed to show the extent to which medical schools in Canada are successfully addressing anti-Black racism.

Symbolic Solidarity or Virtue Signaling? A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Public Statements Released by Academic Medical Organizations in the Wake of the Killing of George Floyd

PURPOSE

Many academic medical organizations issued statements in response to demand for collective action against racial injustices and police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. These statements may offer insight into how medical schools and national organizations were reflecting on and responding to these incidents. The authors sought to empirically examine the initial statements published by academic medical organizations in response to societal concerns about systemic, anti-Black racism.

METHOD

The authors searched for initial public statements released by a sample of academic medical organizations in Canada and the United States between May 25 and August 31, 2020. They assembled an archive with a purposive sample of 45 statements, including those issued by 35 medical schools and 10 national organizations. They analyzed the statements using Fairclough's 3-dimensional framework for critical discourse analysis (descriptive, interpretive, explanatory), which is a qualitative approach to systematically analyzing language and how it reflects and shapes social practice.

RESULTS

Many statements used formal and analytical language and reflected hierarchical thinking and power differentials between statement producers and consumers. The authors identified several tensions in the statements between explicit messaging and implied ideologies (e.g., self-education vs action to address racism), and they found a lack of critical reflection and commitment to institutional accountability to address anti-Black racism in academic medicine. The authors also found that many statements minimized discussions of racism and de-emphasized anti-Black racism as well as portrayed anti-Black racism as outside the institution and institutional accountability.

CONCLUSIONS

This research offers insight into how 45 academic medical organizations initially responded following the murder of George Floyd. Many of these statements included self-exculpatory and nonracist discursive strategies. While these statements may have been well intentioned, organizations must move beyond words to transformative action to abolish institutional racism in academic medicine.