Post Beyond Flexner Conference 2018

It has been a few weeks since our Beyond Flexner Conference and we are thrilled about all of the exciting ideas that were shared and the collaborations that are being forged nationally and internationally!  

This newsletter is to highlight some of the exciting opportunities ahead of us and we look forward to your ongoing engagement and innovation in the field of health equity and social mission promotion in health professions education.
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Host the Next Beyond Flexner ConferenceIs your school interested in being the host of the next Beyond Flexner conference? The next conference should be in mid-to-late September 2019. We will soon be forming our Site Selection Committee and sending out an official invitation for schools that might be interested in hosting. In the meantime, if your school is interested or if you have a recommendation of another school that you think would be a good site, we’d like to hear from you. Please contact Leigh Anne Butler at lbutler@gwu.edu with your suggestions.

Join Our Alliance!

Are you interested in becoming more involved?
 
Please reach out to Leigh Anne Butler with a description of your interests at lbutler@gwu.edu.
Action Agenda. Below you will find some of the inspiring connections and collaborations made at the conference! Please share your stories with us as you make progress in your work as we would love to feature you in upcoming newsletters! Here is some inspiration:
 
We attended the Beyond Flexner 2018 conference and presented a poster on an anti-racism curriculum we are developing with the goal of incorporating it into the mandatory curriculum at UNM SOM. At Beyond Flexner we met other students, from schools across the country, who are working on projects at their institutions tackling these same issues. It was wonderful to network with other students passionate about anti-racism in healthcare and we plan to share curriculum resources with these students. We also hope to collaborate with other students on scholarship about student-led, anti-racism curricular interventions. If you are working on this type of intervention at your institution, please contact Hadley Pope at Hpope1@salud.unm.edu. ​
 
Hadley Pope, Medical Student
University of New Mexico
 
I'm a social worker based in St. Louis working with the local med schools to incorporate health equity, trauma-informed care, social and structural determinants of health, and personal identity work into their curricula with a goal of creating a pipeline of providers going into primary care or community practice. The Beyond Flexner conference offered so much insight and helped me generate new ideas and consolidate ideas that I'd had previously. Of particular help to me was actually the Young Flexnerian meet up where I met with some other younger folks to talk about their work and, in the process, learned about narrative medicine and the work of some Teaching Health Centers, both extremely relevant to what I'm trying to accomplish in St. Louis. Lastly, the data about the lack of black, male representation within med schools, while not surprising, does give me a new angle for conversations with med school administration: not only do we need more primary care doctors but we also need more doctors that look like our most vulnerable populations. What are we doing to help increase and retain the number of black men who come through our doors? How can curriculum reform help us to that end? My brain is still on overdrive more than a month later. I can't wait until next year!
 
Kaytlin Reedy-Rogier, MSW
Pipeline to Compassionate Care Program Coordinator
St. Louis Integrated Health Network
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Young Beyond Flexnerians
Our largest group to date of trainees and early career professionals attended the conference! We are thrilled to see so much interest and are working toward creating a space to nurture and catalyze their ideas. If you are interested in helping expand, mobilize, and inspire this growing cohort, please reach out to Isabel Chen with your ideas and interests at isabelchenmd@gmail.com.