In May 2020, the Coalition for Physician Accountability’s Work Group on Medical Students in the Class of 2021 Moving Across Institutions for Post Graduate Training (WG) released its final report and recommendations. These recommendations pertain to away rotations, virtual interviews, Electronic Residency Application Service opening for programs and the overall residency timeline, and general communications and attempt to provide clarity and level the playing field during the 2020–2021 residency application cycle. The WG’s aims include promoting professional accountability by improving the quality, efficiency, and continuity of the education, training, and assessment of physicians. The authors argue the first 3 WG recommendations may disproportionately impact candidates from historically excluded and underrepresented groups in medicine (HEURGMs) and may affect an institution’s ability to ensure equity in the selection of residency applicants and, thus, warrant further consideration.
The authors examine these recommendations from a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) perspective. For each of the first 3 WG recommendations, the authors highlight new opportunities created by the recommendations and detail challenges that programs must carefully navigate to ensure equity for all candidates. The authors also recommend solutions to guide programs as they address these challenges, meet new common program requirements, and attempt to promote equity for HEURGMs. Finally, the authors recommend that after the 2020–2021 recruitment cycle, the medical education community evaluate DEI-related outcomes of both the WG’s and the authors’ recommendations and incorporate the findings into future application cycles.
Policy decisions should be informed by science, but legislators and their teams have limited capacity to connect with evidence-based resources and the expert community. By strengthening ties between science and policy, these two domains can be more readily integrated when making policy decisions. We established a process for building science and technology councils for Members of Congress, which function as a platform for scientists and legislators to engage. Legislators were selected by gauging the potential for objective, nonpartisan information from scientists to inform their work, as well as their offices’ prioritization of science policy issues. Experts with deep knowledge of these scientific issues were vetted, recruited, and appointed to the councils, and Members of Congress were connected to their designated councils. This bridging of science and policy demonstrates a platform that scientists can utilize to communicate objective, policy-relevant research and analysis as a trusted source of information, leading to more scientifically informed policy decision-making.
As the US and the world struggle through the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for science and technology (S&T) expertise in governance has become even more stark. But in the US, the vast majority of legislators and their staffs are generalists, and they have limited resources for engaging with S&T. This can be a barrier to both legislative branch oversight of S&T-related issues and the development of evidence-based public policies, two functions that are especially critical in times of crisis. The obstacles to addressing these gaps have, however, created opportunities for innovations in how lawmakers connect with S&T resources, resulting in new models for scientist-policymaker engagement. Our program, the Congressional Science Policy Initiative (CSPI), experiments with models for connecting crowdsourced S&T expertise with policymakers, namely, by enriching key congressional hearings with contributions gathered from the science community, organizing advisory councils of scientists and engineers that brief lawmakers, and crowdsourcing technical assistance from the S&T community for legislative initiatives. These activities, which rely on the collective intelligence of the S&T community and have been readily applied to supporting lawmakers’ decision-making processes during the pandemic, have bolstered legislative branch oversight of the Executive Branch, fact-finding into corporate practices, and evidence-based policymaking.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.