The UCLA Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine along with the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA aim for excellence in the areas of education, research, community engagement, and clinical care. Our core values of diversity and inclusion are absolutely inseparable from these institutional goals. A critical part of our mission is to actively recruit a diverse group of fellows. This goal to encourage and promote diversity extends to our faculty and staff and is integral to our success and continued progress as a Division and training program.
In 2020, 20% of the 25 UCLA pulmonary/critical care fellows in our program are from groups traditionally underrepresented in medicine, which is twice the national average reported recently in the literature (JAMA Netw Open 2020). In addition, 45% of our graduates over the last 3 years were women, which is 30% higher than the national average. We are also proud that we were able to retain over half of these graduates onto our faculty.
Our faculty and staff are similarly diverse from a race, ethnicity, and gender perspective with a number of women in leadership positions including our program director and clinical chief, Dr. Tisha Wang. Dr. Wang is one of two faculty mentors for the recently launched “Women in Medicine” interest group within the UCLA Internal Medicine Residency Program and sits on the Department of Medicine Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Advisory Board.
At UCLA our fellows have the opportunity to engage in a number of EDI activities to promote community building, open dialogue and lifelong learning in the health equity and advocacy space. Furthermore, the fellowship is LGBTQ+ affirming and UCLA Health is consistently rated highly by the Human Rights Campaign’s Healthcare Equality Index. Please refer to the UCLA Health LGBTQ Resources webpage for further information here: https://www.uclahealth.org/lgbtq. Check out highlights from our GME Equity and Diversity Inclusion and our Department of Medicine Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion to learn more.
In response to the #HCW for #BLM movement, we are forming a Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement (DICE) taskforce in our division for 2020-21 comprised of faculty and fellows focused on community outreach, advocacy, reducing disparities via research initiatives, and other activities such as book clubs and story slams.
Lastly we invite you to view a UCLA-affiliated campaign to inspire underrepresented minorities to become physicians, entitled “Black Men in White Coats” featuring our own recent graduate of the UCLA pulmonary/critical care fellowship class of 2020, Dr. Wale Amubieya.
