Health Justice Standards 2024 UPDATE

The following report represents the first review of the Health Justice Standards (HJS), a commitment to health equity formally developed by Emory J Willis Hurst internal medicine (IM) residents, residency program leadership, and Department of Medicine (DOM) leadership in the spring of 2021. These standards frame how the residency program and the Department of Medicine aim to build a more equitable healthcare system and training environment. The original HJS focused on 17 standards in 5 major areas.

This report reviews the progress made thus far. It was written collaboratively by residents, faculty, and program leadership. In the report we highlight areas of success and areas of ongoing work. This report is intended to serve as a living document that is consistently updated, as we work to honor and improve the aims of the original health justice standard commitment.

We divided the standards into those that the residency program can directly implement, and standards that require cooperation with external offices – such as the office of graduate medical education (GME) or health system leadership -- to complete.

For those standards under the direct control of the residency program, we assigned ourselves a grade for the sake of transparency:

• Achieved: areas in which substantial progress has been made, and the goal now is to maintain progress.
• Within reach: areas in which progress has been made, but additional work can be done to achieve the full intent of the standard. 
• Not achieved: areas in which additional health justice investment is needed.

We did not assign a grade to those standards beyond direct residency program control, however we still narrate the positive steps taken in those areas as well as what additional work needs to be done.

It is important to note that these grades are the subjective interpretation of the group of residents and faculty who wrote this report. Nonetheless, it is only through honest assessment of our progress that we could achieve the intentions of the original HJS report: mitigating the history of racism and bias in medicine and medical education to improve health outcomes for all patients.