Nashman Spotlights: Dr. Maranda Ward Receives Transform Mid-Atlantic Award

Dr. Maranda Ward, assistant professor in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, has received Transform Mid-Atlantic's JEDI-CCE Award for her work "A Community Informed, Anti-Racist Curriculum in the Health Professions".

Dr. Ward is an assistant professor at the George Washington University (GW) in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences(SMHS), with a background in Sociology/Anthropology, Maternal and Child Health, as well as Education. She has been a leader at GW and beyond in examining the impact of structural racism and implicit bias in the health professions, and researching the training of health professionals as a key to dismantle the structural inequities seen in the healthcare setting. Dr. Ward’s academic career has always involved community engagement, particularly an approach that models epistemic justice and values community knowledge.

Dr. Ward’s most recent work aims to address the need for racial justice training in the health professions in a concrete way. The specific partnership highlighted in this nomination is the development of video-based learning modules about structural racism in healthcare in partnership with a Community Advisory Board comrpised of DC residents. Once tested for the efficacy in a Fall 2022 study with GW medical students and, eventually, students in other health professions, the videos are intended to be shared widely in medical education settings. The modules center community residents, community leaders, and community experts most impacted by these inequities, and who are doing the daily work to upend racism in our community.

Dr. Ward and her Community Advisory Board firmly believe that implicit bias and an understanding of structural racism in communities must be explicitly addressed in the training of all healthcare professionals. Dr. Ward and the CAB’s videos provide a way to provide that training, and are an approach that is easily replicable in other medical schools, who eventually will be welcome to also use the learning module videos, which feature real community members sharing their lived experience of racism in seeking health care.

As part of this project, Dr. Ward is collecting data that will assess the impact of community-centered, anti-racist educational modules on learner outcomes at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Her pilot program, beginning Fall 2022 will integrate these learning modules with a service-learning program in the GW SMHS. Two hundred medical students participating in service-learning at Bread for the City, a Federally Qualified Health Center will also view and reflect on the videos. Using these outcomes, she will expand the use of the curriculum to students in other health professions tracks.