About the host:

Fatou Barry is a second year Master’s in public health student in the school of global public health at New York University. Her interest in global health began as a young girl traveling back and forth to Senegal, West Africa to visit family. “I’ve always been aware of health disparities and their impact in underdeveloped nations, but understood its gravity when I went to Senegal to visit my grandparents in 2021 and saw how the severe shortage of health resources along with the struggles of COVID-19 were impacting people’s lives.” Inspired by this experience, Fatou is completing her practicum with the Boston Congress of Public Health where she conducts research and facilitates conversations about health disparities and cultural competency. In the future, Fatou aspires to work within global health organizations to help improve health services and resources in Senegal and other low-income countries. You can find Fatou spending her spare time cheering for Bayern Munich and cooking for friends and family.

About the Guests:

Dr. Behzadi is a board-certified anesthesiologist and published intercultural writer. In 2008, she became inspired to pursue avenues for cultural understanding/unity and allyship after she was racially discriminated against in her medical training and experienced the power of allyship-advocacy from an unlikely source. She successfully ran an intercultural consulting business for 6 years before starting IIC FIRM.

Kay Nikiforova, M.A. (they/them) is the Head of Clinical & Research at Violet and developed Violet's proprietary cultural competence benchmarking algorithm and education framework. Their research and clinical experience is focused on LGBTQ+ and TGNC identities, cultural competence and trauma exposure, and they’re currently pursuing their PhD in Clinical Psychology. Kay is passionate about leveraging technology and advocacy to advance identity-centered healthcare and create a more equitable healthcare system.

Abiba Salahou is a fourth-year medical student at Oakland University William Beaumont (OUWB) School of Medicine in Rochester Hills, Michigan, and a member of the national Gold Humanism Honor Society. Prior to starting medical school, she spent two years working as a Clinical Research Assistant for
the Department of Surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC. She completed her undergraduate coursework at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY where she majored in Biology. Outside of medicine, she is extremely passionate about community organizing and restorative social justice work. She serves as a mentor for marginalized students, is committed to the field of psychiatry, and intends to serve diverse communities as a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist.

Ronald Wyatt, MD MHA, Founder and CEO of Achieving Health Equity, LLC., and a Senior Fellow IHI. He is an internationally known equity, safety and quality expert. Dr Wyatt was the first co-chair of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Equity Advisory Group and is faculty for the IHI Pursuing Equity Initiative. After serving as the Medical Director for the US Defense Health Agency/Military Health System Patient Safety Analysis Center, he became the first

medical director of The Joint Commission (TJC) Office of Quality and Patient Safety and the first patient safety officer for The Joint Commission. While at TJC, Dr Wyatt led the team that wrote the Patient Safety Systems Chapter, contributed to sentinel event alerts and created the Quick Safety publication. He served as technical adviser on the RCA2 document that has been widely adopted as a guide to completing a root cause analysis. Currently, Dr Wyatt is faculty/adviser/coach on multiple health equity collaboratives.

About the course:

Intervention strategies such as cross cultural education are used by hospitals and clinics nationwide. However, their overall effectiveness is frequently contested. Can singular, once-a-year courses on cultural competency increase a healthcare provider’s sense of cultural competency? Can all races, ethnicities, genders, and other groups receive equal care with universal and standardized trainings? In this course, we discuss some of the implementation efforts undertaken to improve the quality of care of patients and individuals with many overlapping and intersectional identities in healthcare and non-healthcare settings.

Learning Objectives:

• Detailing the different types of cultural competency programs that have been utilized in healthcare and non-healthcare settings
• Learning about equity fluency tools utilized in diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice work

Public Health and Social Justice Topics Covered:

• Health Equity
• Racial Justice