About Us
The UCLA Minority Housestaff Organization is a housestaff-driven organization dedicated to the mission of excellence through diversity. The organization aims to recruit, develop and advance physicians from historically under-represented racial and ethnic groups in medicine as well as advocate for the communities who helped produce us. We are a diverse group of minority physicians and allies who aim to advance equitable health for all patients, champion diversity in medicine, sustain mentorship within the institutions of academia and healthcare, promote inclusion within the clinical learning environment, and transform our greater Los Angeles community.
The UCLA Minority Housestaff Organization (MHO) is a professional organization of historically under-represented in Medicine (URiM) trainees and allies. The organization advocates and supports the professional and career development of URiM trainees, provides mentorship to medical students, and provides outreach to future generation of physicians in our community. As an organization we value health equity for all and work within the UCLA health system to improve access to care for underserved and marginalized patient populations. We believe that providing access to quality care and equitable treatment is essential to the training experience of all physicians. We are proudly supported and funded by DGSOM and UCLA Health.
Our Mission
The UCLA Minority Housestaff Organization is a housestaff-driven organization dedicated to the mission of excellence through diversity. The organization aims to recruit, develop and advance physicians from historically under-represented racial and ethnic groups in medicine as well as advocate for the communities who helped produce us. We are a diverse group of minority physicians and allies who aim to advance equitable health for all patients, champion diversity in medicine, sustain mentorship within the institutions of academia and healthcare, promote inclusion within the clinical learning environment, and transform our greater Los Angeles community.
We live out these values through the following pillars:
Historic and systemic injustice continues to perpetuate the gross healthcare disparities we witness every day in caring for our patients. We are committed to understanding and studying their fundamental structural causes, as well as measuring and rooting out inequities through transparency in health informatics and equitable data. Because physicians have served as critical institutional bulwarks in maintaining these disparities, we are dedicated to thorough transformation of physician training to ensure all generations of healthcare workers demonstrate practical knowledge of both the social determinants of health and how bystander intervention and local advocacy can promote an anti-racist physician workforce. We strongly advocate for holistic review of trainees and faculty because we cannot afford to ignore untapped human capital in our diverse communities that is too often structurally hindered at various stages of the workforce pipeline. We continually strive to improve our climate of equity and inclusion as we understand that equity for our BIPOC and LGBTQ+ community is a marathon.
We believe a diverse physician workforce is essential to creating an inclusive climate of excellence. To achieve this, we believe in facilitating future leaders in health advocacy, medical education, clinical and translational research, and health policy. We understand that through systemically biased institutions, physicians from all minoritized groups are underrepresented in leadership. We are invested in providing trainees the tools for career advancement clinically, in academia, and in medical education. The UCLA Minority Housestaff Organization is committed to partnering with our medical school and has developed mentorship with UIM and LGBTQ+ medical students who will continue to lead this legacy of equity and diversity.
We know that providing health care to our community is a privilege entrusted to us by the public, whom we bear a duty to serve regardless of condition. We honor this privilege by acknowledging our responsibilities to serve Greater Los Angeles, both City and County. Our residents and fellows serve in hospitals and clinics throughout Southern California comprising a myriad of federal, state, and county institutions. These experiences and our roles as public servants within a state-funded land-grant institution undergird our advocacy for UCLA to fulfill its commitment to the under and uninsured individuals of our city.
We are invigorated towards change within ourselves and our institution through advocacy joined with organizing. Our constituents have partnered with medical students, staff, and faculty to push our health systems towards anti-racist transformational change. Through demonstrations, petitions, town hall participation, and media we are beginning to exercise power in moving institutional leadership to make enduring structural changes to our institution as a down payment in advocating for our patients and opening the medical system to more of the underserved. We hope to continue to bolster physician diversity within UCLA so that we may more fairly serve all people in the communities in which we live.
Contact us with any questions: UCLAMHO@mednet.ucla.edu