April 12, 2018 — The second annual Celebration of Diversity Week started early Monday morning with an invitation to all UF College of Medicine students, faculty and staff to have their portrait taken by emergency medicine physician and former photojournalist Giuliano De Portu. After more than 100 participants smiled for the camera, each was asked to consider the answer to questions like, “What makes you most proud about being who you are?”

More often than not, the question was met with a burst of nervous laughter. After a moment, however, an outpouring of self-reflection and self-appreciation came from the participants’ mouths.

The annual Celebration of Diversity Week, held April 2-7, was created to highlight the variety of backgrounds and experiences that make the UF College of Medicine an epicenter for providing quality patient care. Donna Parker, M.D. ’90, organized the week’s events alongside fellow faculty members, students and staff. She said the aim of Celebration of Diversity is to infuse diversity into the UF Health Science Center at every level and in every conversation.

“When we came up with the idea last year to celebrate diversity, my true goal was that, within our health science center, each person will think about diversity in their everyday conversations and decisions,” she said. “I realized diversity wasn’t on a lot of people’s radars. The people who value it talk about it, but we need to start a larger conversation with more people. We know that diversity is valuable to our patients in terms of providing culturally competent care. My motivation for working so hard at increasing the number of underrepresented students, faculty and staff is so that we can provide the best care for all of our patients.”

About 40 UF College of Medicine students gathered in the George T. Harrell, M.D., Medical Education Building Tuesday to enjoy a “Soul Pancake” lunch. Text projected on screens around the room invited them to “take a seat and make a friend.” Second-year medical students Annalese Williams and Ciara Styles instructed their classmates to approach someone they had never spoken with before and chat about topics like the first time they fell in love, items on their respective bucket lists and life-changing experiences. To seal the deal, the new friends were asked to create a secret handshake.

“We want you to learn from each other, share with each other and really focus on making our relationships stronger,” Styles told the students.

An emergency medicine department grand rounds on diversity, inclusion and equity Thursday featured a talk on unconscious bias from Sheryl Heron, M.D., professor and vice chair of the emergency medicine department and assistant dean of medical education and student affairs at Emory University School of Medicine. Heron, who was born in Jamaica and raised in New York, co-authored the textbook “Diversity and Inclusion in Quality Patient Care.”

“The lens through which we see things impacts the care we give to patients. There are blind spots that may lead us down the wrong path and affect the patient outcome,” she said. “Pay attention to what your patient tells you. Acknowledge your reactions. Understand why you felt that way. Search your soul for ways to think differently about the situation. It takes courage to respond differently.”

Other events during the 2018 Celebration of Diversity included a talk from Mona Fouad, M.D., M.P.H., director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham Minority Health and Health Disparities Research Center, in conjunction with the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions’ Research Day, as well as a talk on stigma and culture’s contributions to mental health disparities from Michelle Jacobs-Elliott, M.D., and Andres Pumariega, M.D., of the UF department of psychiatry.

The week wrapped up on Saturday with the annual Office for Diversity and Health Equity Emerald Ball, an event established 15 years ago by UF medical students to provide accepted minority students with an opportunity to learn more about the college in an effort to encourage their enrollment.

Good began the program, welcoming the college’s potential students and others, including keynote speaker Oluwaferanmi Okanlami, M.D., an assistant professor of family medicine with a joint appointment in the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Michigan Medical School.

Okanlami congratulated Good and the UF College of Medicine for maintaining a dialogue about the value of diversity.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion is important because all of us bring experiences — our trials and tribulations — to the table,” said Okanlami, who was born in Nigeria before immigrating to the U.S. as a child. “By sharing our stories and our perspectives, we can move forward much stronger and find solutions to the problems that impact all of us.”

Okanlami, a captain of his track and field team at Stanford University and an Academic All-American, attended medical school at the University of Michigan. At the beginning of his third year of residency in orthopaedic surgery at Yale University, he suffered a spinal cord injury that paralyzed him from the chest down.

After two surgeries and intense rehabilitation, he regained some motor function. He went on to earn a master’s degree in engineering, science and technology from the University of Notre Dame and completed a family medicine residency at Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Indiana.

“Too often we judge people on what they cannot do before we give them an opportunity to show us what they can do,” Okanlami said. “I have a catch phrase: ‘disabusing disability’ with the hope to demonstrate that being disabled does not mean one is un-abled. Every voice has a place, and your ideas and thoughts are valid.”

With the week coming to a close, Good said the annual Celebration of Diversity is meant to “renew our commitment to diversity and inclusion and to cultivating a physician and health professions workforce that resembles the makeup of our local, state and national communities.”