Boston Medical Center is a national leader in health equity, working with diverse clinicians and staff to interrogate racial disparities in care and partner with our community to dismantle systemic inequities. Throughout the hospital, we leverage our strengths in clinical care, research, and community partnerships to address longstanding injustices and eliminate barriers to health, as well as focus our research programs on the inclusion of communities typically not included in medical research. We're proud that our patients and staff come from all over the world and from diverse communities in the Boston area. Almost 30 percent of our patients speak a primary language other than English, and so we offer all our medical care and services in over 160 languages, including Spanish, Haitian Creole, Cape Verdean Creole, and more.
BMC’s dedication to inclusion and breaking down barriers has been recognized with many awards, including:
- #1 most racially inclusive hospital in the U.S. by the Lown Institute
- #4 most socially responsible hospital in the U.S. (and #1 in Massachusetts) by the Lown Institute
- LGBTQ Healthcare Equality Leader by the Human Rights Campaign
Learn more about diversity, equity, and inclusion at BMC
Health Equity Track
We are excited to offer a new Health Equity Track within the PEM Fellowship. This is really a fellowship within the fellowship. PEM fellows must decide by the end of their first year if they would like to participate, and then will join with health equity fellows from a variety of other departments at BMC for a 2 year bimonthly curriculum. This curriculum has four overarching categories of focus: the historical foundations of racism in medicine; structural drivers of health; contemporary systems of oppression (racism, sexism, ableism) in medicine; and strategies for addressing racial inequities at different levels. It also incorporates content from the liberation health model.
Fellows within the health equity track will also receive mentorship and support to ensure their PEM project includes a health equity focus, and to give at least one grand rounds related to equity work.
Commitment to DEI
We are committed to the recruitment, engagement and advancement of underrepresented minority (URM) physicians as an irreplaceable piece of our overall goal of equity. Learn more about this commitment, as well as find some clear numbers around physician diversity, from our GME Office of Minority Physician Recruitment.
Some examples of the work BMC does:
The Health Equity Accelerator, which is working to transform healthcare to eliminate gaps in life expectancy and quality of life among different races and ethnicities.
Health Equity Rounds, hosted by our very own pediatrics department
Children’s HealthWatch was founded at BMC and BMC pediatrics and BU school of public health faculty continue to be major contributors
Health City: Health equity news from BMC