About Us

The Health Equity Thread (HET) is designed to equip our students with the knowledge and skills needed to understand and respond to the challenges of ensuring an equitable and inclusive healthcare system. Health equity is incorporated across the YSM curriculum to enhance clinical skills, so students are ready to provide high-quality care for all patients. Achieving health equity will require innovative approaches that address the systemic barriers, social policies, and specific health needs of patients with disparate health outcomes. As such, the HET team, along with its Advisory Group, creates and curates educational content that engages learners from the pre-clerkship phase and extending into the advanced training period.

The HET team partners with educational leaders and faculty in the School of Medicine, including the Physician Associate program and the MD-PhD program, so curricular content related to the major domains of the HET are comprehensively addressed. Faculty development in health equity is an essential component of the HET, and is offered through retreats, conferences, videos, workshops, and one-on-one consultation with colleagues.

The strategic goal of the HET is to train the next generation of physicians and physician-scientists to confront and surmount structural barriers to high-quality health care. The HET’s vision is that YSM students will help shape and lead a more equitable healthcare system and reimagine healthcare delivery to reduce disparate outcomes. . As leaders, our graduates will innovate medical education, work to dismantle systems and structures that perpetuate inequities, champion workforce diversity, and conduct research that addresses these issues.