DEI By Another Name? American College of Surgeons Touts ‘Inclusive Excellence’

In recent years, the public has become more and more aware of the harmful and insidious nature of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), particularly in the fields of medicine and higher education. In response to this backlash as well as anti-DEI legislation, medical schools, medical associations, and other healthcare institutions have rolled back or rebranded their DEI initiatives – sometimes sincerely, and sometimes not.

The American College of Surgeons (ACS) seems to be doing a DEI bait-and-switch by rebranding its Office of DEI to the “Office of Inclusive Excellence.” As of earlier this month, the ACS’s page on its Office of DEI now redirects to its page on the Office of Inclusive Excellence.

The goals of both offices are virtually identical, and each contain ample references to advancing the DEI agenda throughout the ACS’s various activities. 

These include goals to “develop an overall strategic plan for diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism efforts in the College and with its partners to maximize the benefits of our collective work”; to “build a trauma-informed approach into all diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts without causing unintentional harm in addressing diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism”; and to “align DEI programmatic and curricular content to be consistent with common diversity, equity, and inclusion tenets according to subject matter expertise.”

Similarly, the ACS’s DEI Toolkit is now the “ACS Inclusive Excellence Resource and Implementation Toolkit.”

A cursory glance through ACS’s website shows the organization still has up its myriad endorsements of DEI and associated concepts, but these have been placed behind the “Inclusive Excellence” brand. For instance, its “commitment to Inclusive Excellence” simply links back to its “Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”

“The ACS underscores this commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion by ensuring that meaningful positions of leadership are held by Fellows from all constituent groups,” the statement reads.

And more importantly, the Inclusive Excellence toolkit’s resource library makes implicit repeated references to the notion that physician-patient racial concordance will improve health outcomes.

As Do No Harm has shown, this argument lacks evidence. Four out of five systematic reviews of racial concordance have shown no positive impact on health outcomes.

The toolkit also references a debunked 2020 study purporting to show lower infant mortality rates for black newborns that are treated by black physicians.

“The value of diversity in health care specifically as it pertains to patient outcomes is an increasing focus of study. While much of the literature to date is centered on adverse health

outcomes among patients from underrepresented populations, fewer studies have specifically addressed how increased diversity among healthcare providers improves patient care outcomes. One such example is the lower mortality rate for Black newborns when cared for by Black physicians (Greenwood et al, 2020).”

In a commentary published Monday, researchers examined the same data set used in the 2020 study but controlled for low infant birth weight; this made the ostensible racial concordance effect disappear, debunking the study’s findings.

It’s clear that the ACS is attempting to put some distance between itself and DEI as more and more people realize how harmful that radical ideology truly is.

But at the same time, their core DEI commitments and policies appear unchanged. Instead, it seems like the ACS wants to have it both ways; they want to appeal to the ideals of medical excellence exalted in traditional medicine, while maintaining the tenets of woke ideology. 

If the ACS truly wishes to ditch DEI, they need to do more than change a few names.