The Impact of an Interactive Unconscious Bias Training on Perioperative Learners

Providers' unconscious biases reinforce health disparities through negative direct patient care and interactions with colleagues.

We created a workshop grounded in Critical Race Theory and the importance of different intersectionalities to improve medical trainees' self-assessment of their implicit biases in curated facilitated spaces.

A total of 44 UCSF first-year clinical anesthesiology residents (CA-1) (95% response rate) and 23 surgery residents in their research year (77% response rate) participated in this workshop over 4 separate sessions in September 2020 and 2021. Quantitative data from a pre-/post-workshop survey was analyzed via a paired t test to evaluate our workshop's effectiveness. Feedback on efficacy was obtained by coding themes from our survey's open-ended questions.

The workshop was evaluated positively by a total of 65 of 67 participants in the post-workshop survey. On a 5-point Likert scale, participants self-reported they agreed that their unconscious biases affect their clinical interactions from a pre-workshop mean of 3.3 (SD ± 1.32) to a post-workshop mean of 3.9 (SD ± 0.87, P = .008).

Our findings suggest that this workshop was effective for perioperative residents and can be extrapolated to all residents by tailoring the workshop to their respective work environments.