Healthcare Equity for All
The mission of Pathways To Trust is to elevate the rare disease patient's voice to increase access to care and eliminate bias by bringing stakeholders together. Biases, whether racial, gender, sexual orientation/identity, often create an additional challenge for rare disease patients when attempting to access appropriate medical care. Therefore, we believe that one important way to help rare disease patients get the care they need is to educate healthcare providers, and potentially even more important, medical students, about implicit biases often present during patient-HCP encounters, in order to help them eliminate these words and actions in their programs.
We have developed a program called Healthcare Equity for All, which we launched with a pilot program for St. George University medical students at Overlook Medical Center in Summit on November 16, 2022.
This workshop featured:
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Presentations about racial bias, gender bias and sexual orientation/identity from noted expert researchers in each of these areas
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Personal testimonies that illustrate and humanize the experience of these marginalized patients
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Interactive exercises in which participants will have the opportunity to develop strategies to communicate with a variety of patients respectfully and compassionately, and to evaluate their effectiveness
Subsequent programs for this initiative are in development. We plan to present programs that highlight the impact of bias as a whole as well as provide a deeper dive into specific biases including race, gender and LGBTQ+ issues and how they affect access to care and health outcomes.
If your health system, hospital or organization would be interested in a healthcare equity program, please contact us at info@pathwaystotrust.org.