Aligned Leaders & Change Targets
Organizing and driving change at institutions that are large and complex is enormously challenging.
One important ingredient is unwavering commitment.
The Guiding Coalition’s approach has been to develop annual Change Targets and objectives that are SMART—Specific, Achievable, Measurable, Relevant, and Time-Bound—relate directly to the mission and priorities of the medical education program.
Below you will find a brief rationale for this Systems Change strategy and lots of detail about this year’s Change Targets.
We are very excited to be working with all of you on this initiative and look forward to collaborating with staff, students, and faculty in the coming year.
David C. Thomas, MD, MHPE
Dean for Medical Education
Chair, Leni and Peter May Department of Medical Education
Professor of Medicine, Medical Education and Rehabilitation and Human Performance
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
David Muller, MD, FACP
Director, Institute for Equity and Justice in Health Sciences Education
Marietta and Charles C. Morchand Professor of Medical Education
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Where we started.
Starting in 2018, through a series of exploratory meetings and surveys with students, faculty, staff, and other stakeholders across the Mount Sinai Health System, the Racism and Bias Initiative’s Guiding Coalition identified change targets or goals to drive our efforts toward our vision to become a health system and health professions school with the most diverse workforce, providing health care and education that is free of racism and bias. Each year the guiding coalition course-corrects existing change targets and identifies new ones that realign and reinforce our efforts.
What’s new for 2024?
The Guiding Coalition is excited to announce the 2024 change targets. This year we’ve developed 18 change targets to continue to shift the six conditions that are holding racism and other interlocking systems of oppression in place in our work and learning environments. These conditions are often the least explicit but most powerful for producing real systems change.
Check out the change targets here and let us know what you think by sharing your feedback on Padlet. Fill out this form if you are interested in attending a listening session to learn more about this year’s change targets, how we hold each other accountable, and how to get actively involved in the change.
Structural Change
Policies, Practices, and Resource Flow
1. Conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the PREview Situational Judgement Test to analyze the effectiveness and equity in the admissions selection process. (Admissions Sphere)
2. Integrate teaching of anti-racist practice longitudinally across the redesigned curriculum. (Curricular Affairs Sphere)
3. Increase clarity and consistency of how the new anti-oppressive Medical Education Program Objective (MEPO) will be assessed across all four years of the curriculum. (Curricular Affairs Sphere)
4. Scale up the standardized patient session on navigating the racist behavior of patients or colleagues during clinical encounters, with the goal of every student completing this session in ASCEND. (Curricular Affairs Sphere)
5. Enhance access to technology for students to complete academic work (Resource Sphere)
6. Facilitate more Mount Sinai community involvement in library collection development for materials related to racism and bias. (Resource Sphere)
7. Increase knowledge around citational justice among students and faculty (Resource Sphere)
8. Build a centralized virtual space to locate and share resources and tools related to racism and bias across UME and GME (Resource Sphere)
9. Implement a mechanism to track policy utilization that will allow medical education to address disparities in academic outcomes for medical students (Medical School-wide Sphere with Student Affairs, Curricular Affairs, and CQI)
10. Restructure Medical Education’s guiding coalition to promote accountability across the medical school (Medical School-wide Sphere)
11. Establish a Chats for Change series in collaboration with Mount Sinai Health Partners. (Clinical Sphere)
Relational Change
Relationships, Connections, and Power Dynamics
12. Enhance recruitment efforts through premedical affinity groups and institutional outreach (Admissions Sphere)
13. Establish a culture of open and active collaboration among members of the Faculty Diversity Council (Clinical Sphere)
14. Enhance the comfort of the Sinai community to discuss issues related to racism in clinical practice, and their familiarity with mechanisms for reporting racism and bias. (Clinical Sphere)
15. Strengthen relationships and create opportunities for collaboration between GSBS and Medical Education Department (Medical School-wide Sphere)
Transformative Change
Mental Models
16. Develop Clinical Competency Mentors who are grounded in personal awareness and antiracist knowledge and skill, and who are equipped with the expertise to seamlessly integrate these values into the foundational clinical instruction of students in the ASCEND curriculum (Curricular Affairs)
17. Enhance growth in personal awareness and anti-racist knowledge and skills among course and clerkship directors who are front-line voices to students and faculty (Curricular Affairs)