Annual Meeting Content Analysis: Leveraging Annual Meetings to Promote Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging in the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry

Abstract

BackgroundThere is an increasing need to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in all aspects of academic medicine, including through continuing medical education (CME). Although professional medical organizations' annual meetings play an instrumental role in CME for physicians, there are no studies describing DEI content in the annual meeting programming of professional medical organizations, including the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry (ACLP), the primary professional organization for Consultation-Liaison (C-L) psychiatrists. MethodsWe examined the publicly available ACLP annual meeting content titles on the ACLP website from 2010 to 2021. National DEI leaders from ACLP’s DEI subcommittee iteratively generated keywords that covered a broad scope of DEI-related themes. Each annual meeting content was independently coded by two members of the DEI subcommittee with discrepancies adjudicated by two additional members. Descriptive statistics were used to characterize the annual meeting content. ResultsOf the 2615 annual meeting titles from 2010-2021 which were analyzed, 2531 were not coded to have DEI themes. 3% (n=84) of titles were coded to have a DEI theme as follows: Culture/Diversity (n=20, 24%), Bias/Disparities (n=17, 20%), Race/Racism (n=17, 20%), Social Justice (n=12, 14%), Gender/Sexism (n=10, 12%), and LGBTQ+ (n=8, 10%). The frequency of DEI titles each year ranged from 1% (2010, 2018) to 17% (2021) with an increase in DEI content in 2021 (n=24, 17%). ConclusionAlthough professional medical organizations like the ACLP are poised to leverage their CME platforms embedded in annual meeting programming to train CL psychiatrists on DEI topics, our findings suggest more work is needed to develop and promote DEI focused educational programming for their annual meetings.