Bill Snyder
In May 2020, then-President and Chief Operating Officer of Boston Children’s Hospital, Kevin Churchwell, MD, helped initiate a transformation of the 150-year-old hospital’s systems and structures.
Boston, grappling with the worst global pandemic in more than a century, was also reeling from the death of George Floyd on May 25 when he was subdued by Minneapolis police. was going up.
A Nashville native and Vanderbilt University medical school graduate, Churchwell, who a decade ago was chief executive officer of Vanderbilt’s Monroe-Carrel Jr. Children’s Hospital, saw these events as an opportunity for change. bottom.
“We’ve started hosting virtual town halls and fireside chats on racism and intolerance,” Churchwell said Monday at a lecture by John E. Chapman, M.D., of Medical Education at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “The question was what to do next.”
For Churchwell, who succeeded Sandra Fenwick as CEO of Boston Children in 2021, the answer was to build an inclusive structure that focuses on education.
The scope of the Hospital Academy for Education and Educational Innovation and Scholarship has been expanded to include programs of equity, diversity and inclusion.
Research grants, visiting professorships, symposiums and fellowships are all designed to support our commitment to being an inclusive learning environment.
To ensure its continued commitment to these goals, in August 2020, Boston Children’s stated that the hospital “does not tolerate any form of racism, discrimination, or prejudice,” impartiality, A six-point declaration on diversity and inclusion was announced.
The six goal statements call for recruiting, developing and retaining a diverse workforce, eliminating systemic racism from hospital policies, guidelines and practices, and providing leadership in reducing child health disparities. It represents the commitment of the hospital.
The hospital also provides comprehensive training on the impact of racism on children’s health and encourages “hard” conversations that can enhance the delivery of culturally effective pediatric care.
Racism will not go away. Those who work in hospitals will continue to face it. What is changing is the conversation, the commitment to verbally support colleagues rather than silently ignoring or accepting intolerance. According to Churchwell, the goal is to move from “bystander” to “bystander.”
“How can we make this experience the right experience?” he said.
In 2021, the hospital will establish the Sandra L. Fenwick Institute for Pediatric Health Equity and Inclusion to reduce health inequities through research, further diversify the pediatric workforce and influence public policy.
Something like the Marshall Plan, for example, is needed to address the national crisis in children’s mental health. “If we do nothing, we will lose an entire generation of children and by definition we will lose the future of this country.
“Every child deserves the chance to live the best life possible,” he concluded. “My responsibility is to try to remove all barriers.”
The Chapman Lecture is named after the late John E. Chapman, MD, who served as Dean of VUSM for over 25 years and made significant contributions at the national level to improving the quality of medical education.