Prevalence and Characteristics of Advocacy Curricula in U.S. Medical Schools.

PURPOSE: Recent national events, including the COVID-19 pandemic and protests of racial inequities, have drawn attention to the role of physicians in advocating for improvements in the social, economic, and political factors that affect health. Characterizing the current state of advocacy training in U.S. medical schools may help set expectations for physician advocacy and predict future curricular needs. METHOD: Using the member school directory provided by the Association of American Medical Colleges, the authors compiled a list of 154 MD-granting medical schools in the United States in 2019-2020. They used multiple search strategies to identify online course catalogues and advocacy-related curricula using variations of the terms "advocacy," "policy," "equity," and "social determinants of health." They used an iterative process to generate a preliminary coding schema and to code all course descriptions, conducting content analysis to describe the structure of courses and topics covered. RESULTS: Of 134 medical schools with any online course catalogue available, 103 (76.9%) offered at least 1 advocacy course. Required courses were typically survey courses focused on general content in health policy, population health, or public health/epidemiology, whereas elective courses were more likely to focus specifically on advocacy skills building and to feature field experiences. Of 352 advocacy-specific courses, 93 (26.4%) concentrated on a specific population (e.g., children or persons with low socioeconomic status). Few courses (n = 8) focused on racial/ethnic minorities and racial inequities. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that while most U.S. medical schools offer at least 1 advocacy course, the majority are elective rather than required, and the structure and content of advocacy-related courses vary substantially. Given the urgency to address social, economic, and political factors affecting health and health equity, this study provides an important and timely overview of the prevalence and content of advocacy curricula at U.S. medical schools.

The Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium: Key Drivers of Transformative Change.

The American Medical Association's (AMA's) Accelerating Change in Medical Education (ACE) initiative, launched in 2013 to foster advancements in undergraduate medical education, has led to the development and scaling of innovations influencing the full continuum of medical training. Initial grants of $1 million were awarded to 11 U.S. medical schools, with 21 schools joining the consortium in 2016 at a lower funding level. Almost one-fifth of all U.S. MD- and DO-granting medical schools are represented in the 32-member consortium. In the first 5 years, the consortium medical schools have delivered innovative educational experiences to approximately 19,000 medical students, who will provide a potential 33 million patient care visits annually. The core initiative objectives focus on competency-based approaches to medical education and individualized pathways for students, training in health systems science, and enhancing the learning environment. At the close of the initial 5-year grant period, AMA leadership sought to catalogue outputs and understand how the structure of the consortium may have influenced its outcomes. Themes from qualitative analysis of stakeholder interviews as well as other sources of evidence aligned with the 4 elements of the transformational leadership model (inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration, and idealized influence) and can be used to inform future innovation interventions. For example, the ACE initiative has been successful in stimulating change at the consortium schools and propagating those innovations broadly, with outputs involving medical students, faculty, medical schools, affiliated health systems, and the broader educational landscape. In summary, the ACE initiative has fostered a far-reaching community of innovation that will continue to drive change across the continuum of medical education.

Ending Racial Bias in American Medicine: A Call for Help from the AMA, NMA, AAMC, and the Rest of Us.

Bias based on skin color, religion, immigrant status, gender, and ethnicity are deeply rooted in American culture and have existed within the infrastructure of American medicine from the beginning. Now, medical educators are struggling to find curriculum and experiences that effectively address explicit and implicit bias among our increasingly diverse group of students, house staff, and practitioners. The leadership, experience, and lessons learned needed to scrub present medical school curricula of racial bias, to develop an antiracist curriculum, and to test its effectiveness already lies with the American Medical Association (AMA), the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), and the National Medical Association (NMA). We call on these organizations to jointly convene a consortium of medical educators, social scientists, curricular specialists, and others to chart a way forward to assist medical schools and professional organizations in developing evaluable curricular materials and experiences to eliminate bias in health care.

Building Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity Into the Fabric of a New Medical School: Early Experiences of the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine.

In July 2020, the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine opened in Pasadena, California, with an inaugural class of 50 students. The school endeavors to address systemic barriers that have contributed to health care and educational disparities in the United States. To realize its vision for change, equity, inclusion, and diversity (EID) have been woven throughout the school. Board members were chosen in part based on their commitment to the core values of EID. The board developed mission, vision, and values statements that explicitly avow a commitment to EID and recruited a dean (and the dean recruited leaders) who espoused and evinced these values. Leaders, faculty, and staff received training to foster an inclusive environment and ensure accountability. The school developed a curriculum that has been thoroughly evaluated for its representative and inclusive content by a team drawn from all departments. The diverse first class, selected through a holistic admissions approach, has access to student support systems that emphasize an appreciation of the distinct experiences and context of each student. The school plans a rigorous evaluation program to assess its performance in EID. Although the school may well fall short of achieving all of its EID objectives, by learning from its experiences and from evidence of others in academic medicine, the school recognizes its opportunity to continue to come closer to achieving its goals and to help shape and contribute to the national and international discourse on EID.

Texan Continues String of Woman AMA Presidents.

After 151 years of all-male leadership at the American Medical Association, a family physician from Texas broke through the glass ceiling on June 17, 1998. Twenty-one years later, another Texas physician is set to become the AMA's sixth woman president - and its third in a row.

Finding the Sweet Spot: An Interactive Workshop on Diabetes Management in Older Adults.

Introduction: Intensive glucose lowering in older adults with diabetes leads to increased risks with minimal benefits. Surveys indicate that clinician confidence for individualizing glycemic goals and regimens remains low. We created an interactive workshop and clinical tool kit to improve clinician knowledge of safe diabetes management in older adults. Methods: Finding the Sweet Spot was a 1-hour workshop taught by pharmacists to medical and pharmacy learners that introduced a five-step framework for diabetes management in older adults. The interactive presentation included cases and a clinical tool kit based on current recommendations from the American Diabetes Association and American Geriatrics Society. Pilot workshops were held for 6 months, allowing for real-time revisions based on feedback; final implementation occurred for 6 months thereafter. We evaluated learner self-efficacy (via a 5-point Likert scale) and knowledge (via multiple-choice questions) of diabetes management in older adults before and after the workshop. Results: Thirty learners participated in Finding the Sweet Spot (70% medicine, 30% pharmacy). The percentage of confident learners increased from 55% to 97% (p < .05) after the workshop. All learners demonstrated improvements in knowledge, with the mean score on the knowledge assessment increasing from 61% to 80% (p < .05). Via open-ended feedback, learners expressed satisfaction and found the clinical tool kit especially helpful. Discussion: Our Finding the Sweet Spot workshop demonstrated statistically significant changes in self-efficacy and knowledge among learners, indicating that this interactive workshop improves medical and pharmacy provider confidence and skills in caring for older adults with diabetes.

On the disenchantment of medicine: Abraham Joshua Heschel's 1964 address to the American Medical Association.

In 1964, the American Medical Association invited liberal theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) to address its annual meeting in a program entitled "The Patient as a Person" [1]. Unsurprisingly, in light of Heschel's reputation for outspokenness, he launched a jeremiad against physicians, claiming: "The admiration for medical science is increasing, the respect for its practitioners is decreasing. The depreciation of the image of the doctor is bound to disseminate disenchantment and to affect the state of medicine itself" [1, p. 35]. Heschel's reference to "disenchantment" suggests that he may have been familiar with the work, or at least the outlook, of sociologist Max Weber, whose 1917 address "Science as a Vocation" portrays the modern world as disenchanted by the progress of rationalism. Heschel's life's vocation had been to uncover the inner meaning of religious faith and to translate that faith into principled action. Heschel saw disenchantment not as an inescapable aspect of modern life but rather as the byproduct of physicians' conscious choices to seek worldly success and material comfort. Yet, because of their privileged position as witnesses to human vulnerability, physicians possess an obligation to develop their own personhood, to re-enchant medicine, and through medicine to spark a positive transformation in all of modern life. As Heschel says, "The doctor must realize the supreme nobility of his vocation, to cultivate a taste for the pleasures of the soul. … The doctor is a major source of moral energy affecting the spiritual texture and substance of the entire society" [1, pp. 34, 38]. While Heschel's conception of the physician's role is romanticized and idealized, changes in the organization and practice of medicine have validated his concerns.

Potential need for expanded pharmacologic treatment and lifestyle modification services under the 2017 ACC/AHA Hypertension Guideline.

Application of the 2017 ACC/AHA Hypertension Guideline expands the number of US adults requiring blood pressure (BP) management. The authors use 2011-2014 NHANES data to describe the population groups most affected by the new guideline, compared with the previous JNC-7 guideline, and describe the previous interaction with the health care sector among those adults recommended new or intensified pharmacologic treatment and/or lifestyle modification. The 2017 Hypertension Guideline reclassifies 32.3 million US adults as newly hypertensive and recommends BP-related treatment of 133.7 million adults, including 57.8 million with uncontrolled BP recommended to initiate or intensify pharmacologic treatment and 50.5 million newly recommended lifestyle modification alone. An estimated 13.1 million (22.7%) adults recommended to initiate or intensify pharmacologic treatment, and 20.6 million (40.8%) adults newly recommended lifestyle modification alone report not having established health care linkages. Among the adults newly recommended lifestyle modification alone, the odds of reclassification from no recommended intervention, under JNC-7, to recommended lifestyle modification alone were lower for adults with established linkages to care (aOR: 0.78 [95% CI: 0.67-0.91]) compared to those without, decreased with increasing age, were greater for men (1.72 [1.52-1.94]) compared to women and were greater for obese adults (1.23 [1.00-1.53]) compared with normal or underweight adults. Application of the 2017 Hypertension Guideline increases the number and alters the distribution of US adults in need of initiating or intensifying BP treatment. This includes identifying millions of US adults who previously had limited interaction with health care and are now recommended new or intensified pharmacologic treatment and/or lifestyle modification.