Starting strong: Evaluation of a graduate medical education wide virtual health equity orientation workshop

Residency programs are responsible for ensuring that trainees understand and are able to address health disparities. Despite this requirement, individual residency training programs face challenges in achieving this aim. However, graduate medical education (GME) offices have the potential to overcome these barriers.

To describe the development and implementation of a GME-wide virtual health equity orientation workshop and self-reported learner outcomes.

Incoming residents participated in a GME-wide virtual health equity orientation workshop in June 2023 and completed pre-, post-workshop, and six-month post-workshop surveys. We used chi-squared tests and Fisher exact tests as appropriate to compare pre-post workshop scores for multiple choice questions and used rank-sum tests to compare pre-post self-assessed knowledge and confidence scores.

There were 234 residents who participated in the workshop and 80% of residents consented for their information to be included for research. There was a significant increase in self-assessed knowledge and confidence scores in the pre-post comparison, but self-assessed behavior scores fell to baseline at six months. Over 85% of incoming residents had previously received formal education on racism and discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. However, only 62% had previously received formal education on ableism in medicine. Additionally, 94% of the participants found the workshop relevant to their needs, and 85% stated that they learned a new skill.

A GME-wide orientation workshop designed to promote knowledge of health equity topics is feasible and well received. This workshop showed a positive impact in self-assessed knowledge and confidence but should be reinforced with longitudinal programming.