Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, M.D., director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) at the National Institutes of Health, delivered the annual S. Rexford Kennamer Distinguished Lecture in Internal Medicine, sponsored by the School of Medicine Montgomery Regional Medical Campus.
At the lecture, Pérez-Stable presented "Diversity and Inclusion in Clinical Medicine in the Times of COVID" at 11 a.m. on Tuesday via Zoom.
During his presentation, Pérez-Stable said diversity “gives us more excellence, more creativity and more innovation.”
“Diverse teams are better at solving problems; they broaden the scope of inquiry, and they bring more solutions to complex problems,” he said.
He said the idea first came about in the business world, but is also shown in science and medicine, saying the impact of workforce diversity on access to health care and addressing health disparities has been empirically shown in data and research.
Pérez-Stable's expertise spans a broad range of health disparities disciplines. His research interests have centered on improving the health of racial and ethnic minorities and underserved populations, advancing patient-centered care, improving cross-cultural communication skills among health care professionals, and promoting diversity in the biomedical research workforce.
In his presentation, Pérez-Stable shared initiatives at the NIMHD to recruit and retain diverse physicians and scientists in the academic medicine workforce, including the weeklong summer Health Disparities Research Institute launched in 2016 for early stage investigators and postdocs. He said the program has had 270 participants in the past five years, with 60 percent URiM and 20 percent physicians.
He also spoke about unconscious biases and cited effective tools to begin addressing those biases in the workplace and in the clinical environment.
Recognized as a leader in Latinx health care and disparities research, Pérez-Stable has spent more than 30 years leading research on smoking cessation and tobacco control policy in Latinx populations in the United States and Latin America.
Before leading health disparities research at the NIH, he built a career at the University of California, San Francisco, where he was a professor of Medicine, chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine, and director of the Center for Aging in Diverse Communities, at which he continued his commitment to developing a diverse workforce in clinical and population science research by mentoring and collaborating with minority fellows and junior faculty. Pérez-Stable was also director of the UCSF Medical Effectiveness Research Center for Diverse Populations, which addresses issues for Black/African Americans, Asians, and Latinx in the areas of cancer, cardiovascular disease, aging, and reproductive health.
Established in 1978, the Kennamer Distinguished Lecture series bring nationally recognized leaders in healthcare to Montgomery to interact with the medical, business and political community, and to discuss their views on important issues in medicine. The lecture series was endowed through the generosity of the late S. Rexford Kennamer, M.D.—a Montgomery native and cardiologist—to ensure the series continued for the benefit of future generations of physicians Montgomery and the River Region.