Our Diversity Mission
The mission of the Ohio State University Medical Center is to improve people's lives through innovation in research, education and patient care. Diversity is central to our academic medical center mission and serves as a driver of institutional excellence. We recognize diversity as relating to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability.
We celebrate and learn from our diversity. We see diversity as the uniqueness each of us brings to achieving our shared mission and goals. We recognize and value different perspectives, characteristics, experiences and attributes of each individual in creating an environment where we thrive on and benefit from our differences.
Our Diversity Vision
Diversity optimizes our academic Medical Center’s educational outcomes for healthcare professionals, trainees, researchers, and patients. In support of the Medical Center vision, the education mission has adopted a vision of transforming health care by educating leaders for the health professions. The key strategies used to accomplish this vision are:
- Fostering curricular innovation to develop measurably excellent health professionals.
- Enhancing the culture of humanism and professionalism to support relationship-centered care.
- Rewarding teaching excellence to ensure that the students we graduate are capable of meeting the health care, wellness, and biomedical research needs of a diverse community.
There are so many reasons that enhancing diversity on campus is vitally important for our educational mission. Here are just a few:
- Student body racial and ethnic diversity within U.S. medical schools is associated with outcomes consistent with the goal of preparing all students to meet the needs of a diverse population.
- Attaining a critical mass of students underrepresented in medicine and biomedical sciences avoids the negative effects of isolation.
- Students underrepresented in medicine and biomedical sciences are more likely to serve minority and lower socioeconomic communities after completion of medical training thus improving health care access and diminishing health care disparities.
- A diverse faculty and student body will expand the intellectual pool from which new ideas about research, education and patient care arise.
- Students and faculty who have persevered despite educational and/or socioeconomic disadvantages will help to increase the awareness of our community to health care and educational disparities. This awareness is the first step toward development of programs to eliminate these disparities and improve people’s lives.
- A diverse faculty improves climate and helps provide a welcoming environment that is attractive and safe to a diverse group of applicants to our institutions.
- A diverse faculty and student body improves climate and helps provide a welcoming environment to a diverse population of patients at our institution.
- Providing a supportive environment to patients when they are most vulnerable is core to our mission to improve patient’s lives through personalized health care.
- Diversity enhances the medical center’s ability to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate services thus improving patient satisfaction, healthcare provider/patient relationships and healthcare outcomes.
- Diversity enhances the Medical Center’s ability to partner with underrepresented communities to conduct translational and community based participatory research.
Deans of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Leon McDougle, MD, MPH
Leon McDougle, MD, MPH, serves on the Wexner Medical Center Diversity Council as a member of the diversity executive committee and co-chair of the diversity council. Dr. McDougle also serves as associate dean for Diversity and Inclusion at the College of Medicine.
As CDO, Dr. McDougle develops, coordinates and promotes diversity efforts throughout our Medical Center. He establishes collaborations with leaders of diversity programs in the other Health Sciences colleges and the University. He also serves on the Diversity Council and the Diversity Executive Committee, and oversees the Area Health Education Center.
Dr. McDougle has been a member of our faculty and medical staff since 2001. He is a tenured associate professor of Family Medicine and the director of the Medical Pathways (MEDPATH) Premedical Postbaccalaureate Program in the College of Medicine. He sees patients in the Department of Family and Community Medicine.
Dr. McDougle is a leader in studying the delivery of culturally competent primary and preventive care for underserved, uninsured and underinsured populations. He helped our College of Medicine garner a five-year, $3.8-million grant to establish a new educational track to train internal medicine residents to meet the medical needs of the underserved. He was also the principal investigator for a major physical fitness research program for African-Americans with type 2 diabetes.