Department of Medicine and University of Wisconsin Collaboration
BRIM INITIATIVE – BIAS REDUCTION IN INTERNAL MEDICINE
The DOM is one of 20 Departments of Medicine around the country participating in Bias Reduction in Internal Medicine (BRIM). Faculty from the University of Wisconsin-Madison received NIH funding to evaluate the effectiveness of a 3-hour workshop designed to address bias in hiring and promotion focusing on issues of ethnicity and gender. The workshop is adapted from educational training they have previously shown to be highly effective in improving the climate around issues of gender diversity.
The team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison visited UVA last Spring and met with the Department’s leadership and a group of faculty co-leads. This was followed by presentations at each Division sharing information about BRIM with the Department faculty. All the faculty were sent a survey to complete as a pre-intervention assessment. We are appreciative of all of the faculty who completed the pre-intervention survey, and encourage those of you who have not done so to take a few minutes and complete the survey sent to you following your Division meeting.
In the Spring of 2019, the University of Wisconsin-Madison team will return, implement their workshop with half of the DOM Divisions, and teach UVA faculty co-leads how to implement the workshop. The group of co-leads will then implement the same workshop with the other half of the Divisions. The same survey (you received this Fall) will be repeated after the workshops and again, at the end of the study. All of the data will be de-identified, and reported back to the Department as aggregated data.
A special thank-you to all of the BRIM co-leads who helped launch this project. They are: Olubusola Gomes, Sula Mazimba, Anne Tuskey, Angie Lucar, Cameron Bryant, Tamila Kindwall-Keller. Terri Washington, and Preston Reynolds.