The Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR), a union representing interns, resident physicians, and fellows and a subdivision of the massive Service Employees International Union (SEIU), is working to inject DEI into clinical practice.
The organization’s “priority issues” include “Immigrant Rights” which, a keen observer may notice, has nothing to do with healthcare or medicine.
But most troubling is the union’s vision of healthcare and healthcare education.
The organization’s “Diversity, Inclusion & Anti-Racism” priority issue states the following: “Our national strategy and local organizing around health justice, racial justice, and social justice ensure our patients, members, and communities have what they need to thrive.”
Indeed, CIR maintains a committed DEI task force with the goal of advancing identity politics in healthcare.
“The members of CIR’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-racism (DIAR) Task Force develop a national strategy and advance local organizing around health equity, racial justice, and improving social determinants of health for our patients, members, and communities,” the task force webpage reads.
This alone is cause for alarm: for one, “health equity” in practice often entails policies aimed at equalizing health outcomes between racial groups. This reduces people to group identities rather than treating them as individuals, opening the door for racial discrimination.
And “social determinants of health” refers to the unsupported notion that social and economic factors such as income determine an individual’s health outcomes, such that policy responses aimed at improving health should target these determinants.
The issue with this theory, however, is that while these factors may be correlated with disparities in health outcomes, the evidence that they actually cause poor health outcomes is shoddy and weak, at best.
Worse, the broad framing of social determinants of health opens the door to precisely this boundless line of reasoning: once every aspect of life can be construed as a health factor, virtually anything can be recast as a medical concern.
In practice, this invites an ever‑expanding role for government and health institutions to intervene in domains far beyond the proper scope of medical care. And it shifts medicine away from its core mission of diagnosing and treating illness, redirecting its focus toward managing broad social conditions that lie far outside the clinical domain.
Next, per the webpage, the task force’s work includes “Advancing language justice initiatives to support patients’ access to healthcare” and, most concerningly, “Negotiating DIAR curriculum and resources into workers’ contracts.”
It’s unclear exactly how this work will impact healthcare in reality, but needless to say, injecting DEI into the healthcare system by way of worker contracts is at the very least concerning.
Physicians should be focused on providing the best care possible, not working to inject divisive and discriminatory ideology into clinical practice.
