By Sunita Mutha, MD, FACP, Director of Healthforce Center

If 2020 was the year of a collective reckoning on racial injustice across the nation, then 2021 was the year of laser-like focus on how to redouble our efforts to advance equity and become more anti-racist. As Healthforce Center at UCSF will celebrate our 30th anniversary in 2022, we are taking extra time to review where we've been and where we are going.

Health systems are uniquely positioned to advance health equity by ensuring that their own workers are well, supported, and equipped to deliver high-quality care. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how work environments in health systems affect the well-being of workers, whose capacity to deliver safe, patient- and family-centered care plays a central role in achieving health.

Healthforce Center at UCSF is excited to announce that Dr. Elizabeth Mertz has been appointed Associate Director of Research to succeed Dr. Joanne Spetz. In this role, Mertz will be responsible for developing new research opportunities and cultivating faculty connections.

“Structural racism.” “Institutional racism.” “Societal racism.” These are phrases that we commonly hear today that signal acknowledgement of the breadth and depth with which white supremacy maintains power in our lives.

These terms also enable some of us, as individuals, to maintain distance between ourselves and “it.” By talking about racism as something larger, all encompassing, and immutable, people can at the same time excuse ourselves from confronting the many ways we uphold and reinforce racism, according to Dr. Monica Soni, Senior Medical Director at New Century Health.

By Sunita Mutha, MD, FACP

One of my passions in my work here at Healthforce Center at UCSF is advancing culturally competent care for all patients. Having served on multiple panels and boards, including the Joint Commission’s Expert Advisory Panel to develop standards for culturally competent care, I believe this is one central solution to dismantling structural racism and achieving health equity.

Story source: CalMatters

By Janet Coffman, Healthforce and Alicia Fernández, Special to CalMatters

COVID-19 has revealed serious flaws in our health system, but none is more distressing than the deep racial and ethnic inequality exposed by the pandemic.

By Sunita Mutha, MD, FACP

By Sunita Mutha, MD, FACP

Jocelyn Freeman Garrick, MD is an emergency department physician who's on a mission to ensure that health care providers reflect the racial and gender diversity of the patients they serve.

Millennials have overtaken Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation, according to the Pew Research Center, but what does it mean for future healthcare leaders of America?