Medical and premedical student leaders of color from as far away as Kansas, Texas and Ohio traveled to a national conference, Sept. 14 to 16, at HMS and Massachusetts General Hospital, where faculty leaders shared insights on medical leadership and service.
The HMS chapter of the Student National Medical Association (SNMA), in collaboration with Mass General, hosted the National Leadership Institute (NLI), a quarterly SNMA conference that brings together underrepresented minority medical and premedical student leaders for three days of leadership training and skill building. The HMS chapter, named National Chapter of the Year and Regional Chapter of the Year in April 2012, spent more than 6 months preparing for the event. Executive board members Ramone Faith Williams, Nicole Jackson, Samsiya Ona and Henrietta Afari spearheaded the planning and logistics of the event with the support of the HMS Office of Recruitment and Multicultural Affairs and the Office of Student Affairs. HMS chapter president Williams and vice president Jackson led a fundraising campaign that raised almost $8,000, with contributions from almost every Harvard-affiliated teaching hospital.
The weekend was a great success. The NLI historically draws 80 to 100 attendees, Williams said, and this weekend drew a record-breaking 130 students. The conference began at Mass General on Friday, with an evening reception at which Peter Slavin, president of Mass General and HMS professor of health care policy, welcomed the visiting students. The following day, workshops began at Mass General and continued at HMS.
The HMS programming included featured speakers Nancy Oriol, HMS dean for students, and Fidencio Saldana, HMS assistant dean for student affairs in the Office of Recruitment and Multicultural Affairs, who led dynamic skill-building workshops on health advocacy and networking, respectively. Another notable workshop featured Patrick Lee, founding director of the Global Primary Care Program at Mass General and an HMS clinical instructor in medicine, who talked about three key habits to sustain a lifetime of service. Other highlights of the weekend included an admissions panel led by Joanne McEvoy, HMS director of admissions, which was of particular interest to the premedical students in attendance.
Augustus White III, HMS Ellen and Melvin Gordon Distinguished Professor of Medical Education at HMS, professor of orthopedic surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the author of Seeing Patients: Unconscious Bias in Health Care, delivered the keynote address on Sunday. He began by discussing the inequalities of American health care. To place the implications of these disparities into perspective, White quoted the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” White said that much of the inequality in health care is in fact due to unconscious bias, and he shared 13 practical ways in which future and current physicians can avoid unconscious bias in their own practices. During the banquet’s closing remarks, the SNMA national president Nisha Branch remarked that the HMS-MGH National Leadership Institute was “the best in recent history.”
Most importantly, Williams said, the success of the NLI worked to introduce underrepresented minority premedical students to HMS. As one student from Howard University said, “Before the NLI, HMS was like dream, but now it’s tangible.”
