AGA Presidential Plenary Focused on Eradicating Disparities in Gastroenterology

During the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Presidential Plenary at the recent Digestive Disease Week annual meeting, John M. Inadomi, MD, president of the AGA, gave a presentation entitled, "Don't Talk -- Act: The Relevance of DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] to Gastroenterologists and Hepatologists and the Imperative for Action."

In this MedPage Today video, Inadomi discusses the main points of his presentation.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

It's my grandfather's motto, which is "don't talk, act." I think we're way beyond the time where we just need to raise awareness of racism, inequities, I think it's time for action. And I think that's what I really wanted to get through, and come through, in my plenary session.

I'm not going to go into detail now, but I have the five D's -- ways to actually interact and disrupt harassment of people when you see racism. I think this is something quite actionable. Just what I want to do is, I realize that all of us have certain unconscious biases and I want to try to get people to raise their unconscious to conscious bias, so they can actually purposely choose to be racist or hopefully anti-racist. And those are the main things about my talk.

Only about 20% of a person's well-being, or even quality of life, or even life expectancy, is based on their healthcare; 80% are the social determinants of health. And if we're going to be actually improving the health of the population, if we're actually going to get, as we say, a world free of digestive disease, we have to get beyond just that 20% of healthcare.

We've got to expand to those other social determinants of health that really impact our patients, including wealth and poverty, food security, and job security, those kinds of things. Those are really important aspects that we'll have to get a hold of.

This is a problem that's increasing. And it's something we have to embrace and something we have to have early understanding and get ahead of. I think, again, what the AGA wants to do is provide that platform, so we can reduce those disparities based on sex or race, and actually increase the diversity of the workforce as well. Not just caring for our patients, but also ensuring that the people in our workforce are a diverse population.

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