MedRACE
Raising Awareness, Celebrating Excellence
MedRACE (Raising Awareness Celebrating Excellence) is a student/staff group at Leicester Medical School, working to progress the British Medical Association (BMA) Charter for medical schools to prevent and address racial harassment since March 2020.
Medical students are the future of the profession. Two-fifths of them are from Black, Asian or other minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds. It takes years of diligence, hard work and dedication to get a place in medical school and students should expect this achievement to be supported by a nurturing and rewarding environment as they train to become doctors.
MedRACE meets monthly to address issues of concern and our activities are broadly shaped by the charter commitments of:
- supporting individuals to speak out
- ensuring robust processes for reporting and handling complaints
- mainstreaming equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) across the learning environment
- addressing racial harassment on work placements
We work in sub-groups on specific projects that raise awareness and celebrate excellence in equality, diversity and inclusion, from co-developing and delivering active bystander training to all first and third year medical students, sourcing theatre headwear for all hair types, to increasing diversity in our staff interview processes by training and working with students on medical school appointment panels. We invite a range of diverse speakers to talk about their career journeys and share our work more widely at national conferences. Our role is to challenge and make progress and celebrate when we do.
Connect
We welcome new student and staff members and we invite collaboration with other institutions. The MedRACE working group can be contacted at medrace@le.ac.uk.
Looking for support?
All staff, students and visitors to the University can disclose experience of unacceptable behaviours, anonymously if preferred, and find out what support is available via the University's Report and Support website.