In the medical field, providing high-quality, personalized and equitable patient care is a top priority. Expanding diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, efforts is one path the University of Florida College of Medicine is taking to help teach the next generation and facilitate the best health care possible.

Under the leadership of Donna M. Parker, M.D., associate dean for diversity and health equity, the college is engaging all its branches with DEI on a structural level by creating a network of faculty diversity liaisons representing and serving every department. The project is part of the diversity, inclusion and health care equity pillar of the college’s strategic plan launched by Dean Colleen Koch, M.D., M.S., M.B.A., in December.

“Many important decisions are made at the departmental level. And so, in keeping with that structure, I thought it was important for departments to each have a representative,” Parker said. “We are not one-size-fits-all. We have a lot of stakeholders who will benefit from this.”

During Women in Medicine Month, celebrated annually in September, the UF College of Medicine honors its female health care workers who are passionate about science and their patients.

Earlier this summer, students from the Pace Center for Girls, an all-girls alternative school, and Girls Place, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering young women, took a field trip to the college, gathering in the George T. Harrell, M.D., Medical Education Building and rotating among stations staffed by college faculty.

The event, hosted by the college’s Women in Medicine and Science advisory board and Office of Faculty Affairs and Professional Development, along with the Medi-Gators Virtual Shadowing Program run through the department of neurology, was designed to inspire the next generation of female physicians and scientists, showing them the breadth of opportunities in health care.

“I hope they get to see how many different career paths there are in medicine,” said Stacy Beal, M.D. ’09, chair of the advisory board for the Women in Medicine and Science group. “They can see that, as women, their opportunities are endless.”

The department of pathology, immunology and laboratory medicine’s forensic medicine distance education program, the first in the world to offer a master’s degree for this discipline that can be completed 100% online, has experienced significant growth as hundreds of students each year complete classes preparing them for careers as medico-legal death investigators, crime scene investigators, medical examiners, coroners or autopsy technicians.

“It offers a lot more flexibility for students, many of whom are working professionals, to get an education in a way that doesn’t disrupt what they’re doing in their 40-hour day job,” said Lerah Sutton, Ph.D., director of the Forensic Medical Education Program and assistant director of the William R. Maples Center for Forensic Medicine.