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.
Of the graduating pulmonary/critical care fellows in our program over the past several years (2018-2021), 13% are from groups traditionally underrepresented in medicine (UIM) and 39% are women, which is above the national average reported recently in the literature (JAMA Netw Open 2020). We are also proud that we were able to retain all of our UIM graduates and over 60% of our female 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 formed an EDI taskforce in our division with the mission of fostering inclusivity, advocacy, reducing disparities via research initiatives, and promoting awareness within the Division.
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.
