By Institute for Global Health Sciences, UCSF, February 10, 2021
In 2020, the unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the state-sanctioned murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, laid bare the persistent disparities in access to quality health care, education, and opportunity facing Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other people of color.
IGHS has undertaken a number of new projects to reduce the inequities in our own house and backyard and across the world. Today, we are officially launching a year-long effort to develop, implement and evaluate virtual reality learning modules for healthcare providers that will allow them to see the healthcare system literally from the perspective of people of color and offer opportunities for them to provide better, more patient-centered care. The project – called CULTIVATE, short for Combating Unequal Treatment in Health Care Through Virtual Awareness and Training in Empathy – will develop immersive virtual-reality learning modules based on real patient experiences elicited through interviews.
“As providers, our unconscious biases have impacts on healthcare outcomes. We are really excited about this program because virtual reality may help rewire our unconscious and change our default judgments and actions to those that will create more equitable healthcare,” said Kelly Taylor, PhD, MS, the co-PI of the project, along with Mike Reid, MD.
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