‘Finding ways we can all grow together’
Late in 2023, Dr. Victoria Haynes joined the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences to serve as its Associate Dean for Multicultural Education. Despite her busy schedule, Dr. Haynes sat down with North Dakota Medicine to discuss her new role at UND, what medical colleges across the U.S. can do to help produce more physicians of color, and the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the U.S.
Welcome to UND, Dr. Haynes! Although it’s now almost summer, when we met last January during the week of the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, it was about minus five degrees outside in North Dakota – a bit cooler than you’re used to.
It’s definitely been an adjustment. But I came prepared. I brought my parka, gloves, scarves, all my cold weather essentials. The only thing I was missing was ski goggles. I had no idea how cold our eyes can get.
Yes! The wind here blows in your eyes, making them water – and then your tears freeze! What sort of MLK Day things were you involved with?
I had the pleasure of attending my first MLK brunch here and it went really well. We had a great speaker, there was good energy, a packed house, and we all got good information on not only MLK’s legacy, but how we might act on that vision. During and after the brunch, there were opportunities for students, faculty, and staff to help serve the community and to have that servant leadership mentality that MLK demonstrated for us. It was really positive to be a part of that experience and I look forward to future MLK celebrations.
You’re coming to UND to do this work after a long career in nursing – and you’re still practicing, I know. Give us a sense of what attracted you to a career in healthcare, and then how that career led to your interest in cultural awareness initiatives?
I’ve been an advocate for change throughout my career in nursing. I had my first role as a Director of Diversity for small nursing school back in Missouri. Since then, I have worked in different academic settings for several years doing diversity work, along with consulting work for local organizations. I’m really passionate about promoting awareness on diversity topics, and, as a person of color, I’m able to share my unique experiences and my journey. I’ve really always been drawn to this type of work. I remember one of my first nursing teaching positions: after I was in that role for a year or two I was appointed to a new role because throughout my teaching role I’d been incorporating a lot of cultural competency and a lot of promotion of diverse topics. I always helped advocate for students’ clinical sites to be more diverse and really worked with a lot of my clinical preceptors. From there, it was a natural transition into a new role that developed into a position as director of diversity and cultural competency. I continued to gain more experience and continued to work on more initiatives, and so it’s been exciting to bring both of my passions – the importance of diversity and healthcare – together.
As you know, UND has done a lot of work over the past few years to focus on being an inclusive campus, including the conference that we hosted on campus previously. Give us a sense of how you want to build on those successes. What would you like to see UND and the SMHS do more or more of in this arena?
We have some great people here who are really committed to making UND more inclusive, and to helping prepare our clinicians to serve diverse populations. I really just plan to assess what we have and build on our strengths to make sure that we’re not reinventing the wheel. If there are things we can build on, we can do that and make sure that we’re collaborating with UND so that the School of Medicine & Health Sciences can be a part of the university’s inclusion and affinity initiatives as well. I would also like to see more opportunities for meaningful dialogue. This will help us build more intentional relationships with each other, because if we can understand each other, we can better understand the diversity we have within school. I plan to have regular workshops and educational opportunities that all faculty, staff, and students can attend. I also think it’s important that we prepare our healthcare workers to serve those diverse populations. They need to be comfortable with that, so I’d like to see more opportunities for students to experience diverse populations in the clinical setting and to see a lot of diversity awareness content threaded throughout the curriculum in every department.
To that point, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has been upfront about wanting to produce more black and Latinx doctors, nurses, and therapists across the U.S. Is there literature that suggests outcomes can improve if, say, an African American population is treated by more African American physicians?
Absolutely. The literature has supported that idea for several years. And anytime that we’re providing culturally responsible care, the literature shows that health disparities can decrease, meaning we’re helping promote health equity. So, it’s very, very important that we are training our clinicians to serve the diverse populations that our world is producing – we’re becoming more and more diverse globally. We also know that people of color are a missing population in healthcare. I want to say that’s getting better – I’m definitely seeing more diversity in healthcare in our country compared to 20 years ago. But we still have a long way to go. The AAMC reports that most active physicians right now are white males over the age of 60. And we’re still lacking in racial, ethnic, gender, and even age diversity. So even though things are a little better than they had been, we still have a ways to go, and we know that the literature supports that when we have people of color treating people of color, outcomes improve.
Insofar as we still lack physicians of color in the U.S., what are some of the barriers that have kept people of color from entering medicine, even two decades into the 21st century?
This is a very complex question. Some of the obvious barriers would be financial barriers – making sure that you can afford higher education – because we know that the cost of higher education has increased. Another barrier is that prospective physicians often don’t have examples – they don’t have that mentor. So, if you don’t have any family in higher education, or that have completed a college degree, you don’t know how to navigate the education system. And we’ve also found that when you do have people of color in higher education who don’t have those mentors, they’re less likely to stay in the program when they hit some of those roadblocks – retention rates are lower. Mentors can help you navigate that system, and we see an increase in retention with mentors.
Your role is primarily administrative, but will you be having any direct contact with medical or other students to talk about diversity and equity?
Absolutely. I am all hands-on. I’ve already met with a group of medical students, and that meeting went well. I also am meeting with the health sciences students and look forward to getting their perspective and ideas on how they see multicultural education here at UND and how we can improve it. My position entails helping teach SMHS students about issues relating to the effective interaction in a healthcare setting with people from different cultural backgrounds, and I do really plan to be hands-on and plan to be a face that you recognize and see on campus. I plan to be intentional about building those relationships with the students – along with faculty and staff – and finding ways we can all grow together.
