EDIIA and Social Accountability in Emergency Medicine
The DFCM Division of Emergency Medicine is committed to including the concepts and values of equity, diversity, inclusion, indigeneity, and accessibility (EDIIA) in our teaching and policies and to being socially accountable. Our EDIIA and Social Accountability teams work together to enhance the learning, teaching, and patient experience and address the health needs of our community members.
By way of introduction, we are Nadia Primiani (she/her) and Sydney Tam (she/her) and we are the equity, diversity, inclusion, indigeneity, and accessibility (EDIIA) co-leads for the DFCM Division of EM.
Our role is to promote and ensure inclusion of EDIIA concepts and values into all aspects of teaching, communication, and policy within the Division. We also hope to act as liaisons with EDIIA leads from the tridivision EM programs, the teaching hospital education site leads, and the DFCM EDIIA program.
This is a newly developed position, so we will be working closely with our Division's Social Accountability Leads, sharing values and ideas.
We welcome questions and dialogue regarding EDIIA and wish to provide a safe environment for such discussion. Please do not hesitate to contact us regarding anything EDIIA related. Our goal is to enhance people's learning and teaching experience, and ultimately the patient experience. It is also important to us not to promote polarization of views.
Keep your eyes open for a new EDIIA video we have developed discussing the importance of this work and how we can make changes moving forward.
Please let us know if you have any ideas/projects you think we could collaborate on with you, as we look forward to working with all of you.
Nadia Primiani, EDIIA Co-Lead, Sinai Health System
Sydney Tam, EDIIA Co-Lead, Markham Stouffville Hospital
The Division of Emergency Medicine is committed to DFCM's vision to support and enable department-wide efforts to address the health needs of community members who are most impacted by social determinants of health.
As one of society’s most important social safety nets, emergency departments (EDs) act as the “canaries in the coal mine,” seeing the downstream effects of inequities in the social determinants of health. As we serve vulnerable members of our communities, we have a responsibility to be accountable to those communities, and to work to address the structural factors that create inequities in the first place.
We are dedicated to building a community of practice that brings together emergency physicians who are working to address upstream challenges and equip them with the tools they need to responsibly and effectively advocate for the most vulnerable members of their communities.
This includes:
Supporting research that seeks to understand or address the impacts of the social determinants of health on individuals in EDs and the system itself.
Ensuring that emergency medicine education includes teaching the broader structural factors that impact emergency medicine presentations and effective management.
Providing physicians with the skills needed to responsibly and effectively call on their own experiences in the ED in order to advocate for upstream policy changes.
Sharing and disseminating information and strategies to improve clinical care for patients who are negatively impacted by health inequities.
Hasan Sheikh, Social Accountability Co-Lead, UHN
Jennifer Hulme, Social Accountability Co-Lead, UHN
