BLM student protest

Our Commitment to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

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 pulmonary/critical care fellows recruited to our program over the past several years (graduating classes of 2021-2026), 9.5% are from groups traditionally underrepresented in medicine (UIM) and 47% 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 about 50% of our female graduates onto our faculty.

Dr. Thanh at a BLM rally

Our faculty and staff are similarly diverse with a number of women in leadership positions including our former clinical chief and Senior Clinical Vice Chair of Medicine, Dr. Tisha Wang. Dr. Wang is one of two faculty mentors for the “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.

Our division has an EDI taskforce with the mission of fostering inclusivity, advocacy, reducing disparities via research initiatives, and promoting awareness within the Division. One of the co-chairs of the EDI taskforce is our program's Associate Program Director, Dr. Roxana Hixson. 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 LGBTQIA+ 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 herehttps://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.

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 and co-chair of our EDI taskforce, Dr. Wale Amubieya.