Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

The UCLA Multicampus Fellowship in Infectious Diseases is committed to promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion and fighting against racism, not only within the fellowship program but in the academic community of UCLA as a whole.  As infectious diseases clinicians and researchers, we are acutely aware of how the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed fundamental structural racial and socioeconomic barriers to health in our society.  We are making the following concrete steps to address these issues:

• Application of holistic review and implicit bias training in review of fellowship applications and evaluation of candidacy for fellowship training with the goal to identify individuals with the desire to excel in the knowledge, skills, and structural competency to improve infectious diseases and overall health outcomes for individuals and communities across diverse settings locally and globally
• Examining our recruitment strategies, by analyzing the number of underrepresented minority applicants across the continuum of application pipeline: applications, screening, interviewing, ranking, and matching
• Establishment of an evening journal club series featuring academic articles that explore structural inequities in healthcare as they pertain to infectious diseases
• Establishment of a recurring book club on racism in medicine
• Active participation in efforts to increase application to subspecialty training among underrepresented minorities among UCLA medical students and residents
• Promotion of research focusing on the impact of infectious diseases on socioeconomically vulnerable populations
• Cultivation of a culture of inclusion within the fellowship program and UCLA in general

We are proud of the training program that we have created and continue to strive for improvement from year to year. We are also strongly committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion and believe that we serve as an example for open dialogue, life-long learning, and compassionate quality care. Check out what we are doing as a fellowship program to promote equity, diversion, and inclusion, as well as highlights from our  UCLA GME Equity and Diversity Inclusion efforts and our UCLA Department of Medicine Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (DOMEDI), one of the few such offices within departments of medicine across the country.

We work hand-in-hand with our colleagues in the UCLA Department of Medicine Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion as well as the Graduate Medical Education office on efforts related to equity, diversity, and inclusion and are excited to welcome fellows into our program who have new, fresh ideas on how we as participants in a fundamentally flawed healthcare system can learn and improve.

Sincerely,

The UCLA Multicampus Fellowship in Infectious Diseases Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee
Oladunni Adeyiga, MD PhD (Fellowship EDI Committee Lead)
Tara Vijayan, MD MPH
Paul Adamson, MD MPH
Debika Bhattacharya, MD MSc
Mary Cambou, MD
Catherine Le, MD MSc
Christopher Graber, MD MPH
Paul Allyn, MD
Risa Hoffman, MD, MPH