Become a member and receive career-enhancing benefits
Our top priority is providing value to members. Your Member Services team is here to ensure you maximize your ACS member benefits, participate in College activities, and engage with your ACS colleagues. It's all here.
Become a member and receive career-enhancing benefits
Our top priority is providing value to members. Your Member Services team is here to ensure you maximize your ACS member benefits, participate in College activities, and engage with your ACS colleagues. It's all here.
The American College of Surgeons (ACS) has put together the following resources on Diversity and Cultural Competency to assist surgeons with the challenges they may face. Click on a box below to explore the resources we have compiled.
Needs Assessment Tools
Cultural Competency at Work
Recognizing Implicit Bias
Creating Diverse Surgical Team
Diversity Resources
Needs Assessment Tools
Diversity, inclusion, and equity can be promoted at both the individual and organizational level. Take a test! Assessment tools can provide a stimulus to implement change and elucidate deficiencies. Below are links to nationally recognized assessment tools:
Project Implicit Project Implicit is the product of a team of scientists whose research produced new ways of understanding attitudes, stereotypes and other hidden biases that influence perception, judgment, and action. They have created a tool to help you elucidate your biases.
National CLAS Standards The HHS-Office of Minority Health established the Center for Linguistic and Cultural Competency in Health Care (CLCCHC). They created the National CLAS Standards, which includes guidelines that inform, guide, and facilitate both required and recommended practices related to culturally and linguistically appropriate health services. This resource will help you determine whether your institution is meeting national standards in delivering culturally competent care.
Cultural Competency at Work
In order to provide effective and equitable care for patients of all backgrounds, surgeons must recognize and understand the potential influence of culture, divergent beliefs, and values on the ways in which patients and their families seek and receive care as well as the way in which we—as individual surgeons, a profession, and institutions—deliver care. These resources provide an introduction to the key tenets of cultural competence for the surgeon at the individual and institutional level.
There is increasing recognition of the role implicit bias plays in health care disparities, including for surgical patients. Implicit bias may also impact on how we interact with our colleagues, trainees and other members of the health care team. As implicit bias operates in an unintentional and often unconscious manner, it can exert its influence on the way in which we care for and communicate with patients and team members silently. Below we present a series resources on recognizing implicit bias in our practices, as well as a series of quick tests for testing one’s own implicit biases in the workplace.
Diverse teams have been shown to be more effective, creative, and successful. Much of our understanding of diversity within teams comes from the business and management literature, but more recently there have been efforts to extend this to the setting of health care teams, including surgical teams. The resources below provide some theory, evidence and tips on how to foster diversity in the workplace and in the health care team.
AAMC Diversity 3.0 Learning Series The Association of American Medical College’s (AAMC’s) Diversity Policy and Programs has developed a set of online, on-demand video resources on a range of diversity and inclusion topics. The Diversity 3.0 Learning Series includes interviews with thought leaders and experts, faculty career development webinars, guidance on institutional strategic planning and culture and climate assessment, and presentations on innovative programs at AAMC member institutions.
