campus connection
“Schools need to change their curriculum. They need to unpack how they perpetuate racist attitudes when describing racial differences in health. Narrowly focusing on personal choices and ignoring larger harmful oppressive structures to describe the Blackwhite health chasm cultivates systems of inculpability.” —Dr. Nicole Avant
that expand their world view and help them mitigate bias,” Haines said. “That’s one of the great things about going to college, you get to learn from people who are different from you.” Service events like health fairs, or student pharmacists tutoring high school students, can improve the quality of instruction at underserved schools and expose future pharmacists to underserved communities. Interacting with high school students as mentors or role models could lead to inspiring those students to pursue pharmacy as a career, simultaneously aiding another AACP goal, to attract a more diverse student population. “We need a more diverse faculty, too,” he continued. “The pipeline is a long one because it takes time to train people to become faculty members, so if we don’t have enough students graduating from our schools who come from underrepresented communities, then we’re certainly not going to have enough faculty members who come from underrepresented communities. We need to make an effort. We need to encourage our graduates to consider advanced degrees beyond their doctor of pharmacy degree so they can consider becoming faculty members someday.”
Diversifying Perspectives and ‘Primary Voices’ In his unconscious bias trainings such as the one he led at the leadership forum, Braylock sometimes shows a video of the Terence Crutcher police shooting in Tulsa, Okla., where you see a Black man with his arms up and hear police officers in a helicopter say, “That looks like a bad dude.”
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Academic Pharmacy NOW 2021 Issue 3
“I don’t think they even meant anything bad by it, but in my opinion, that naturally flowed from them, which is really the heart of implicit bias, this unintentional and unconscious tendency to be able to discriminate against people in situations without you even knowing about it,” Braylock said. He brings up intention in regard to academic pharmacy because the racial diversity of pharmacists continues to underrepresent the racial diversity of society. “If there’s not an intentional effort to change that then it will stay the same,” he said. Braylock believes recruitment can transform pharmacy as a healthcare profession and transform the health and wellness of the nation, by investing in Black and Brown children as early as kindergarten. “Going to the beginning of that student’s development and providing them with rich learning experiences, is that a quick remedy? No. Is it sustainable and meaningful? Yes, it should be, because you are not putting Band-Aids on situations, you are addressing the root cause.” In the meantime, Braylock agrees that requiring students to participate in culturally diverse co-curriculars will help them become more well-rounded healthcare professionals and individuals. Embedding social determinants of health into all courses will help mitigate bias. Schools should at least have one required course that focuses extensively on the issue. “In pharmacy, we can be systems-oriented when it comes to patients, but I don’t think we are systems-oriented when it comes to students,” Braylock noted. “As objective as we are about patient lab values and blood pressure and A1C levels,