Thursday, September 21, 2023
As HSN’s Clinical Lead for Social Accountability, Dr. Alex Anawati is passionate about ensuring HSN is actively anti-racist and a safe place for people to work and for patients to receive high quality health care services.
Working in joint leadership roles with HSN and the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University’s (NOSMU) Dr. Gilles Arcand Centre for Health Equity, Dr. Anawati works to strengthen social accountability at HSN and is contributing to developing its equity, diversity, inclusiveness and anti-racism strategies and having an impact through three recently published articles.
As part of a multi-series being published in Canadian Family Physician, Anawati and his colleagues explain in their first article their use of Rapid Evidence Narratives to support social accountability strategies. In their second article, they describe how racism is a “dangerous social phenomenon” in healthcare and how it causes “mistrust of healthcare providers, underuse of health care and therefore poorer health outcomes.”
Dr. Anawati and his colleagues state that it is key for all health organizations to “lay out a plan to be actively anti-racist in how we deliver care” and that healthcare workers and physicians “have an obligation to take action that assures high-quality health care services are available to everyone, free from racism” through a “commit[ent] to self-improvement, humility and a willingness to learn.”
Dr. Anawati and his colleagues have also published foundational work on the importance of a framework of social accountability standards in the British Medical Journal Open, which are being used to inform HSN’s social accountability strategy.
You can read the articles in Canadian Family Physician Journal here-
(1) https://www.cfp.ca/content/69/9/630
(2) https://www.cfp.ca/content/69/9/594
You can read the article in the British Medical Journal Open here-
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/13/9/e073064
They will also be discussing their work on an upcoming Canadian Family Physician Podcast, which will be released in early October here- https://cfppodcast.libsyn.com/
(Co-authors of the articles include Nusha Ramsoondar, MPH (award winning, 4th year medical leaner at NOSMU); Dr. Erin Cameron, PhD (Director of the Dr. Gilles Arcand Centre for Health Equity and Associate Professor NOSMU); and, Dr. Jacqueline Harvey (alumni NOSMU).)