Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Sub-committee

Over recent years, there has been a development in our understanding of what it means to be “other” and the significant impact that this has on health and wellbeing with, for instance, clear gaps in life expectancy between indigenous and non indigenous people in both Australia and New Zealand . As an Association for Health Professional Educators, it is important that we continually re-assess our role in helping to ensure diversity, inclusion and equity in health.

When looking at what we can do as an organisation, we need to ask ourselves:

• Does the membership and leadership of our organisation represent the diversity of our Australia and New Zealand? In particular, are first nations people represented in our organisation and our leadership?

• Are we as an organisation being inclusive? And are the voices of those with diverse attributes being heard?

One of the first ways that we can get an understanding about the diversity and inclusion of our organisation is to ask our members to fill in optional information about their personal attributes when renewing their membership. These attributes would be age, gender, sexual orientation, culture/ethnicity and disability. All of the data are kept secure and confidential under the ANZAHPE privacy policy (insert link – see below)). When we run data collection, we will not link personal attributes to names and when we report on our organisation’s diversity, we will use broad terms. For example, in the most recent censuses in Australia and New Zealand , approximately 200 ethnic groups were described but, as our organisation is relatively small, these will be narrowed down to nine broad groups in Australia and six broad groups in New Zealand so that if for example we were reporting on ethnic groups, we would report on South East Asian members rather than report on ethnic groups with only one member which could potentially allow that member to be identified.

We already have data on the health professions that are represented in our organisation, so that once we have a clearer understanding of the characteristics of the members of our organisation, we can direct our efforts to encourage membership, leadership and inclusion of the diverse communities present in our countries and our health professional educators.

This is the first step that we need to take as an organisation. The next step is to ensure that our organisation educates and empowers our members to lead and support change in their own institutions so that the composition of our student cohort and the content and process of our teaching reflects diversity, inclusion and equity, with the goal of improving the health of the communities that we serve.

We have a subcommittee for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to help guide our policies, decisions and actions which meets via zoom for a short meeting every 1-2 months. We are looking for new members on our subcommittee and we would particularly welcome those from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds. Please send any Expressions of Interest to Anna Vnuk, anna.vnuk@jcu.edu.au