Academic Medicine's Journey Toward Racial Equity Must Be Grounded in History: Recommendations for Becoming an Antiracist Academic Medical Center.

The harsh realities of racial inequities related to COVID-19 and civil unrest following police killings of unarmed Black men and women in the United States in 2020 heightened awareness of racial injustices around the world. Racism is deeply embedded in academic medicine, yet the nobility of medicine and nursing has helped health care professionals distance themselves from racism. Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), like many U.S. academic medical centers, affirmed its commitment to racial equity in summer 2020. A Racial Equity Task Force was charged with identifying barriers to achieving racial equity at the medical center and medical school and recommending key actions to rectify long-standing racial inequities. The task force, composed of students, staff, and faculty, produced more than 60 recommendations, and its work brought to light critical areas that need to be addressed in academic medicine broadly. To dismantle structural racism, academic medicine must: (1) confront medicine's racist past, which has embedded racial inequities in the U.S. health care system; (2) develop and require health care professionals to possess core competencies in the health impacts of structural racism; (3) recognize race as a sociocultural and political construct, and commit to debiologizing its use; (4) invest in benefits and resources for health care workers in lower-paid roles, in which racial and ethnic minorities are often overrepresented; and (5) commit to antiracism at all levels, including changing institutional policies, starting at the executive leadership level with a vision, metrics, and accountability.

COVID-19 Threatens Progress Toward Gender Equity Within Academic Medicine.

Women remain underrepresented within academic medicine despite past and present efforts to promote gender equity. The authors discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic could stymie progress toward gender parity within the biomedical workforce and limit the retention and advancement of women in science and medicine. Women faculty face distinct challenges as they navigate the impact of shelter-in-place and social distancing on work and home life. An unequal division of household labor and family care between men and women means women faculty are vulnerable to inequities that may develop in the workplace as they strive to maintain academic productivity and professional development without adequate assistance with domestic tasks and family care. Emerging data suggest that gender differences in academic productivity may be forthcoming as a direct result of the pandemic. Existing gender inequities in professional visibility, networking, and collaboration may be exacerbated as activities transition from in-person to virtual environments and create new barriers to advancement. Meanwhile, initiatives designed to promote gender equity within academic medicine may lose key funding due to the economic impact of COVID-19 on higher education. To ensure that the gender gap within academic medicine does not widen, the authors call upon academic leaders and the broader biomedical community to support women faculty through deliberate actions that promote gender equity, diversity, and inclusion. The authors provide several recommendations, including faculty needs assessments; review of gender bias within tenure-clock-extension offers; more opportunities for mentorship, sponsorship, and professional recognition; and financial commitments to support equity initiatives. Leadership for these efforts should be at the institutional and departmental levels, and leaders should ensure a gender balance on task forces and committees to avoid overburdening women faculty with additional service work. Together, these strategies will contribute to the development of a more equitable workforce capable of transformative medical discovery and care.

Marketing the Research Missions of Academic Medical Centers: Why Messages Blurring Lines Between Clinical Care and Research Are Bad for both Business and Ethics.

Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) offer patient care and perform research. Increasingly, AMCs advertise to the public in order to garner income that can support these dual missions. In what follows, we raise concerns about the ways that advertising blurs important distinctions between them. Such blurring is detrimental to AMC efforts to fulfill critically important ethical responsibilities pertaining both to science communication and clinical research, because marketing campaigns can employ hype that weakens research integrity and contributes to therapeutic misconception and misestimation, undermining the informed consent process that is essential to the ethical conduct of research. We offer ethical analysis of common advertising practices that justify these concerns. We also suggest the need for a deliberative body convened by the Association of American Medical Colleges and others to develop a set of voluntary guidelines that AMCs can use to avoid in the future, the problems found in many current AMC advertising practices.

Restorative Justice as the Rx for Mistreatment in Academic Medicine: Applications to Consider for Learners, Faculty, and Staff.

The mistreatment of learners is an ongoing issue at U.S. medical schools. According to responses to the 2017 Association of American Medical Colleges Graduation Questionnaire, 39.3% of medical students nationally reported being mistreated. Many articles have been published on the topic of mistreatment at medical schools over the last 20 years. These articles have focused primarily on the definition of mistreatment, the impact of mistreatment, and initiatives put into place to help mitigate the problem. To date, very little attention has been paid to repairing the harm caused by mistreatment and rebuilding community trust. Academic medicine is in need of new forums of interaction to achieve more positive learning and workplace environments.The authors discuss restorative justice practices and the potential applications that they may have in academic medicine learning and workplace environments to serve vulnerable students, faculty, and staff who are targets of mistreatment. Restorative justice practices are used to convene groups of people to engage in substantive dialogue about consequential issues that impede community functioning. This process can help a group identify and gain mutual understanding of the personal and collective harm that has occurred, create the conditions that incentivize offenders to admit responsibility rather than deny or minimize the harm, and explore and define a set of problem-solving steps to address the harm and rebuild community trust.

The ethics of insurance limiting institutional medical care: It's all about the money.

Dr F. Inest practices surgery at a renowned medical center but is concerned because increasing numbers of medical insurers are excluding his institution from coverage. Many of his former referring physicians are beginning to send their patients elsewhere for this reason. The marketing people have been busy increasing their advertising buys and exploring new business models. There is even talk about reducing expensive clinical trials. However, regardless of his affiliation, he has little control over these and other organizational decisions that directly impact his practice clinically and fiscally. What should he do?

Ethics and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities in Patient-Centered Comparative Effectiveness Research.

The Affordable Care Act includes provisions for the conduct of large-scale, patient-centered comparative effectiveness research. Such efforts aim toward the laudable moral goal of having evidence to improve health care decision making. Nevertheless, these pragmatic clinical research efforts that typically pose minimal incremental risk and are enmeshed in routine care settings perhaps surprisingly encounter an array of ethics and regulatory challenges and opportunities for academic health centers. An emphasis on patient-centeredness forces an examination of the appropriateness of traditional methods used to protect the rights, interests, and welfare of participants. At the same time, meaningful collaboration with patients throughout the research process also necessitates ensuring that novel approaches to research (including recruitment and consent) entail necessary protections regarding such issues as privacy. As the scientific and logistical aspects of this research are being developed, substantial attention is being focused on the accompanying ethics and regulatory issues that have emerged, which should help to facilitate ethically appropriate research in a variety of contexts.