Programs

Our work is broad, collaborative, and comprehensive. This includes training and education modules around cultural humility, implicit bias, civility, microaggressions, and identity, to name a few. We are creating strategies that will help in early cultivation, sourcing, recruitment, retention, mentoring, coaching, sponsoring, and promoting faculty from historically underrepresented groups. We leverage data from a variety of platforms to do our work around health equity in community and institutional DEIJ priorities.

Our office helped to create affinity-based employee resource groups for our GME trainees.

Lunch for Thought

The UConn Health Office for Diversity and Inclusion is excited to launch a series of quarterly conversations titled “Lunch for Thought: A Journey into Inclusivity, Equity, and Respect.” This series is open to all members of the UConn Health community. We invite you to join us. The series will use short readings, podcasts, essays, brief documentaries, and other media sources to address topics like diversity, inclusion, health equity, belonging, hate, and respect. These media sources will be used to drive virtual facilitated conversations hosted by subject matter experts from UConn Health. The topics and media sources will be announced, posted, and followed by the virtual facilitated conversation one week later. The first session, coinciding with a week of celebrations honoring MLK, will focus on how racism in medicine is a driver of health inequities and the effect that this has on the social determinants of health.

Resources

We have worked closely with Connecticut State Comptroller Sean Scanlon to draft initiatives around health equity statewide to be considered by our state legislators.

The CDO for UConn Health plays a collaborative and leadership role with the new requirement from The Joint Commission regarding the collection of social determinants of health and an action plan designed to mitigate an identified health disparity. Please see our 2023 annual report.

We work with a variety of partners. Much of the work we do aligns with the priorities of the Office of Multicultural and Community Affairs, led by Dr. Linda Barry.

Through the work of ODI, UConn Health is a “hub” for the Truth Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) framework with our partners at UConn Storrs.

UConn Health ODI partners with our ODI colleagues at the University of Connecticut’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice in a variety of programming and initiatives.