AMA Issues Plan to Embed Racial Justice in Its Policies, Fight Disparities

The AMA is committing itself to seeking racial and social justice in the AMA’s policies and aggressively addressing health inequities in this country.

Prior to the annual policymaking meeting of the AMA House of Delegates in June, the AMA Board of Trustees released the five-point, three-year “Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity.”

“This strategic plan represents a step forward in a much longer journey to ground the AMA, health care, and our nation’s health care system around equity with a vision of achieving optimal health for all,” said AMA President-Elect Gerald E. Harmon, M.D.

The plan outlines five strategic approaches to begin tackling these challenges:

• Embed equity and racial justice throughout the AMA by expanding capacity for understanding and implementing anti-racist strategies via practices, programming, policies, and culture.

• Build alliances with marginalized physicians and other stakeholders through developing structures and coalitions to elevate the experiences and ideas of historically marginalized and minoritized health care leaders.

• Push upstream to address all determinants of health and root causes of inequities by strengthening, empowering, and equipping physicians with the knowledge of and tools for dismantling structural and social drivers of health inequities.

• Ensure equitable structures and opportunities in innovation through embedding and advancing racial justice and health equity within existing AMA efforts to advance digital health.

• Foster pathways for truth, racial healing, reconciliation, and transformation for the AMA’s past by accounting for how policies and processes excluded, discriminated, and harmed communities and by amplifying and integrating the narratives of historically marginalized physicians and patients.

The strategic plan was not voted on by the House of Delegates, but discussion about the plan during reference committee hearings prior to the meeting of the House were intense and sometimes heated. A special forum will be held to discuss the strategic plan at length during the AMA Interim Meeting in November.

The AMA Section Council on Psychiatry supports the strategic plan. Section council chair Jerry Halverson, M.D., pointed out that the plan fleshes out goals reflected in a number of policies already adopted by the House in recent years.

“The House of Delegates has stepped up and charged the AMA administration to recognize and dismantle racism in our organization and health care system,” Halverson told Psychiatric News. “This strategic plan is the blueprint to put this into practice, and the section council is in full support.”

Ken Certa, M.D., senior delegate to the council, added, “The plan commits the AMA to engage in soul-searching about ways in which it has functioned in the past to support white supremacy and to evaluate its policies through that lens. The language is strong, but commitment is needed. We supported the efforts begun over the past several years to re-orient the AMA and medicine in general to greater inclusion and respect for physicians and patients of color.”

Dionne Hart, M.D., a delegate to the section council and member of the APA Council on Advocacy and Government Relations, expressed disappointment with testimony at the meeting expressing opposition to the strategic plan. “When the AMA unveiled its strategic plan to embed racial justice and advance health equity, I was proud of my AMA and eager to begin the work,” she told Psychiatric News. “However, a few days later, I was deeply saddened to learn that some delegates opposed the plan.”

She added, “The AMA is the largest and most influential medical organization in our nation. It has progressed from an organization that boldly and publicly permitted only White men to become members and prioritized the needs of White patients to one with a more diverse membership, leadership, and a commitment to minority communities. When it was founded, the AMA set a precedent by closing doors and promoting principles embedded in white supremacy; now, it is imperative that we set the benchmarks for equity and inclusivity. I am eager to engage in a healthy discourse to learn more from my colleagues about their experiences—particularly those with different perspectives—and to share my own experience as a minority woman.”

Section council member Frank Clark, M.D., served on the AMA Task Force on Health Equity out of which was created the AMA’s new Center for Health Equity. He was also a member of APA’s Task Force to Address Structural Racism in Psychiatry.

“The strategic plan is a movement in the right direction,” he said. “We have to be talking about these issues related to equity, diversity, and inclusion in order to narrow the gap in health disparities.”

Clark noted that much of the most heated debate concerned parts of the strategic plan related to the AMA’s history. “The strategic plan is a roadmap to remind us about where we have been in the past, but it can also help us forge ahead in the future. History can make people uncomfortable. That’s OK—we don’t have to live in the past, but we can’t ignore it.”

Clark said APA has chosen to be an ally in the AMA’s effort to embed racial justice and advance health equity. “My question is, what side of history do we want to be on?” ■