Centering Reproductive Justice: A multidisciplinary training curriculum on reflexive anti-racism: Q&A and Discussion

Proposal: Antiracism efforts in healthcare are on the rise, however, they often fail to truly deconstruct the problem and implement change. In order to effectively achieve our home institution, Women and Infants Hospital’s (WIH), mission we wanted to better address longstanding systemic racism and barriers to Reproductive Justice built into the structure of our institution. The concept of Reproductive Justice was established by advocates of color as “the human right to maintain bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” (Sistersong) It is intimately tied to anti-racism efforts as many threats to Reproductive Justice both presently and historically disproportionately affect BIPOC populations. The proposed intervention is a multidisciplinary training and curriculum on Reproductive Justice at Women and Infants Hospital composed of five modules. This training curriculum is multidisciplinary in nature and aimed at any employee of WIH with a potential impact on provision of patient care, particularly trainees, medical practitioners and registered nurses. The course modules include 5 modules: 1. Power, Privilege, and Identity; 2. Introduction to Reproductive Justice; 3. Case based study examples on Black Maternal Health and Doulas; 4. Case based study examples on Trans and Non-Binary Health Care. Each module is facilitated in small group format with up to 10 employees with a paid community co-facilitator. The community co-facilitator is integral to the intervention to help establish community partnerships. Evaluation of course impact is done via pre and post training validated antiracism surveys. An expected secondary outcome is evaluating if the training could improve more objective scores and measures of hospital performance. We aim to collect data on our participants and evaluate effectiveness of such training with the goal to publish our data and package the antiracism curriculum as a tool for other institutions. This project was created with a multidisplinary team of two residents (now fellow and generalist OBGYN), medical student, and certified nurse midwife. Dr. Thorsen and Barber De Brito, CNM completed a fellowship based on anti-racism at Brown University and Barber De Brito CNM has extensive background in health equity work. Dr. DiBiase has worked on projects globally on equitable care. Ella Satish has continued interests in anti-racism and health equity work pre medical school and during her educational studies.