As a medical student, Shravan Asthana hopes to change the lives of patients on a micro level. As a medical student leader who mentors college students looking to address health inequities, he and a group of his peers hope to create a cadre of advocates in the fight to create a more equitable system of care.
While a college undergraduate at Pennsylvania State University (PSU) during the COVID-19 pandemic, Asthana, an AMA member, helped launch the PSU Diversity in Healthcare Conference in response to the tremendous inequities in care that the pandemic laid bare. Though he is now his second year at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Asthana remains actively involved with the event as its founder emeritus.
“When I think about the issues that we've defined as central learning points and learning objectives for these undergrads to familiarize themselves with, and discuss amongst their peers in a collaborative framework, I think of it as a very real-world opportunity to go beyond what undergrad prepares you for,” Asthana said of the conference.
A culture of collaboration
Asthana is hardly a one-man band. A number of medical students from the Penn State College of Medicine have also taken on mentorship and leadership roles with the program.
Asthana credited Abdul-Jawad Majeed, a second-year medical student at Penn State, with growing the conference’s roster of mentors, attracting additional medical student and faculty participation, as the Diversity in Healthcare Conference prepares for its third iteration next year.
As a medical student with patient-facing encounters under his belt, Majeed has a different view on the topics covered at the PSU event. That perspective is one that can benefit many of the medical student participants.
“I’ve seen how some of these things really impact patient care,” Majeed said. For example, when patients with limited English get care from physicians or health professionals who don’t speak their primary language. “I've seen the impact that can have on patient care firsthand through my experiences as a medical student,” Majeed said.
The conference involves components of education and action, and it’s split into two separate phases. The first is more focused on education. During that portion, students split into teams that focus on issues that worsen health inequities, such as ableism, socioeconomics and language barriers. With guidance from their medical student mentors, the college students then learn about one issue and share their findings with the larger group.
In the conference’s second phase, students use a design-thinking model to offer a solution to one of the discussed barriers. The most recent event resulted in eight pilot programs that could help historically marginalized populations, such as mobile health clinics in rural communities as well as language- and accessibility-compatible digital health brochures.
For medical students looking to hone their leadership skills, the AMA offers the chance to distinguish yourself through more than 1,000 leadership opportunities and skill building through online training modules, project-based learning and more.
Voices from the trenches
As a founding voice in the conference, Asthana is proud of its continued evolution.
“I enjoy volunteering my time as an alumnus of Penn State, to guide these passionate, hopeful students toward ensuring the conference and its mission are successful,” he said.
A senior at PSU, Mikaili Puckerine is the event’s director of undergraduate leadership. He touted the near-peer mentorship that undergraduates gain by interacting with medical students.
“The medical students provide a level of practicality to the solutions being generated, but also impart their own insights and experiences so far in the health care field,” he said. “The whole idea is to get undergraduate pre-health care students thinking about ways that they can contribute right now to the systemic issues within the health care system [as well as] what changes they plan to work towards as future health care professionals."
Learn more about the 2022 AMA Health Systems Science Student, Resident and Fellow Impact Challenge, which focused on how medical students and residents across the country have applied health systems science to help patients, physicians and health systems. A book of the abstracts submitted in 2022 is available, as are the books of abstracts submitted in 2021, 2020 and 2018 (all in PDF).
