One Brooklyn Health’s (OBH) Department of Medicine recently received a $25,000 President’s Grant from the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation to develop a novel health training model called EQITI, which stands for Education, Quality and Interprofessional Team Integration.
EQITI aims to provide the highest standard of primary care to residents of central Brooklyn by fostering relationships between patients and their physicians:
“All of [the patients'] barriers to care, including their medical care but also their behavioral care, like issues of transportation, food access, and so on, are assisted by this high-quality care team,” OBH System Chair of Medicine Dr. Patrick Lee said.
True to its name, EQITI intends to make inpatient care more equitable across the city, where standards of life fluctuate drastically. “We’re taking direct aim at the 11-year life expectancy gap,” he said, referencing the fact that OBH patients in Brownsville die 11 years earlier, on average, than patients in Battery Park.
OBH is focused on addressing the root causes of the significant life expectancy gap for the residents of Central Brooklyn communities. Fundamental to this effort is improving access to high quality primary and behavioral health care.
Lee also hopes that the implementation of EQITI at OBH—which is the only residency program on the East Coast offering long-lasting training emphasizing relationships with patients and the primary care team—will improve resident retention rates.
In fact, this year was the OBH’s best recruiting year in their history, which Lee attributed in part to EQITI, given that the training it offers does not exist at other hospitals.
Currently, most residents spend one in every five weeks in the primary care setting, whereas at OBH, residents “live the life of a primary care physician,” Lee said. “If you spent one day every five days in the ICU, you would never learn what that’s like.”
The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation Grant will specifically support faculty development to teach the EQITI model, design of a one-week ambulatory bootcamp for residents entering EQITI, a review of scientific literature, and obtaining baseline data to demonstrate EQITI’s impact.
“What does it look like to engage with our patients across the intersectionality of their lives and the many things they bring to the table that perhaps affect or inhibit their ability to be healthy?” Lee said.
“That kind of training is not training that our faculty have had and we want to develop their ability to teach in that space.”
