The Digestive Health Physicians Association (DHPA) – with more than 2,200 physicians caring for millions of patients across the country – recognizes that racism and bigotry are incompatible with the oaths and moral responsibilities that we, as physicians, accepted in dedicating our lives to protecting the health of everyone in our communities, regardless of race, religion, age, gender, nationality or sexual orientation.
As leaders and healers within our communities, we also know that we have an important role to play in addressing factors that impact the health and well-being not only of our own patients but our communities as a whole – factors that include racism, bigotry, discrimination and related disparities in education, economic security and health care.
DHPA’s core mission is to promote and protect patient access to the highest quality, cost-efficient gastroenterological care, and it’s critical that we rededicate ourselves to rooting out health care policies that exacerbate racial disparities in health care access, delivery and treatment.
Our DHPA member medical practices are equally committed to cultivating diverse and inclusive leadership teams, fostering anti-racist environments in our own workplaces, recognizing the impact of implicit bias on patient care, and working with physicians and staff members to acknowledge and address racism and discrimination.
As a specialty, we must work harder to increase diversity, equity and inclusion within our physician ranks. We must support and create pipeline programs that increase the number of GI physicians from populations that are underrepresented in medicine.
We won’t profess to have the answers. Instead, we pledge to listen, learn and do our best to be a positive voice for change, recognizing that we are bound together in what Martin Luther King Jr. called, “an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
DHPA Executive Committee