Our Commitment

Our residency program is committed to informing, recruiting, and supporting prospective candidates who identify as underrepresented in medicine based on factors such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, and more. We are committed to creating a culture of openness, acceptance, and celebration of our collective differences and experiences.  

As members of communities traditionally underrepresented in medicine, our goal is to recruit and train a diverse group of innovative leaders committed to and passionate about decreasing health disparities among children.  As clinicians, researchers, advocates, and teachers, we hope to diversify the face of pediatrics. Below highlights some areas of focus:

• Recruitment:
  • Attendance at minority medical association conferences (ex, SNMA, LMSA)
  • Host the SCORE Program, which is a funded clerkship for UIM 4^th year medical students applying into pediatrics: Learn more
  • We use a holistic review of applicant files and do not have a specific board score cut-off for consideration. In addition, all Intern Selection Committee members receive training on Diversity, Inclusion and Unconscious Bias, and we use several measures to mitigate bias in our recruitment efforts including suppression of photos and structured interview questions.

• Inclusion:
  • Pediatrics Diversity and GME Diversity Committee host events and programming to promote community building
  • Bias-reporting mechanism
  • DEI representatives on residency council

• Leadership Development & Mentorship:
  • Support our pediatric resident’s participation in various UIM career development programs, such as APPD Advancing Inclusiveness in Medical Education Scholars (AIMS) Program, APA New Century Scholars Program (NCS), and AMSPDC Frontiers in Science (FIS)
  • Connect with opportunities to mentor diverse pre-health and medical students in our departmental and ODME pipeline programs
  • Leadership Education in Advancing Diversity (LEAD) Program: learn more
    
    • Three LEAD groups have successfully published their workshops in MedEdPORTAL, an open-access journal of teaching and learning resources in the health professions (peer reviewed):

    • Do I Belong Here? Confronting Imposter Syndrome at an Individual, Peer, and Institutional Level in Health Professionals 

    • Increasing Health Care Workers’ Proficiency with Using Professional Medical Interpretation: Workshop

    • Words Matter: An Antibias Workshop for Health Care Professionals to Reduce Stigmatizing Language

• Education:
  • Anti-racism curricular thread: learn more

• Health Equity:
  • Office of Child Health Equity, robust education, community engagement and residency advocacy council
  • Opportunities for health equity research through scholarly concentrations

SPAARC: Our department launched SPAARC (Stanford Peds: Advancing Anti-Racism Coalition) with the mission to unify faculty, staff, and learners to promote a culture of anti-racism through immediate action, development of nimble systems, and longitudinal commitment to ongoing work, engagement, and progress towards equity. The 7 action teams were led by a faculty-staff dyad with learners as consultants: recruitment & advancement, racism/HR and measurement, training, leadership representation, communication, community engagement & research, staff engagement. Click here to learn more.

In alignment with the goals of the American Academy of Pediatrics, we seek to “increase the awareness of the importance of diversity; and to encourage the incorporation of the principles of cultural competence into all aspects of pediatric education, training, and practice.” This is done through various activities, including:

Goals:

1. Recruitment of a diverse group of residents 
2. Build community through fostering inclusion and collaboration across Stanford and among the greater pediatric community 
3. Education, specifically around diversity and inclusion, social justice and health disparities
4. Community Engagement