Table 2.
Definitions of Key Abbreviations and Terms
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| AAMC | Association of American Medical Colleges |
| Burnout | “A state of physical or emotional exhaustion associated with chronic workplace stress that involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity”136 |
| Cultural competency | “The ability to interact effectively with people of different cultures”137 and “be respectful and responsive to the health beliefs and practices—and cultural and linguistic needs—of diverse population groups,”137 sometimes also called cultural sensitivity or cultural humility |
| Effort-reward imbalance | A model developed “to identify health-adverse effects of stressful psychosocial work and employment conditions” that “posits exposure to recurrent experience of failed reciprocity at work ‘high cost/low gain’ increases the risk of incident stress-related disorders”138 |
| Explicit bias | Negative or positive attitudes that include “thoughts and feelings that people deliberately think about and can consciously report about”139 |
| Gender discrimination | Discrimination based on a person's gender103 |
| Gender harassment | The most prevalent type of sexual harassment and constitutes “a broad range of verbal and nonverbal behaviors not aimed at sexual cooperation but that convey insulting, hostile, and degrading attitudes about members of one gender,” including sexist hostility and crude harassment103 |
| Implicit bias | “Thoughts and feelings that often exist outside of conscious awareness, and thus are difficult to consciously acknowledge and control”139 |
| Intersectionality | “The acknowledgment that within groups of people with a common identity, whether it be gender, sexuality, religion, race, or one of the many other defining aspects of identity, there exist intragroup differences and that individuals may share and experience multiple identities simultaneously”140 |
| LGBTQ+ | Sexual and gender minority groups |
| Work-life balance | The “comfortable state of equilibrium achieved between an employee's primary priorities of their employment and their private lifestyle,” including time for family, personal relationships, hobbies, and potential responsibilities as a parent and/or caregiver141 |
| People with disabilities | Individuals living with “any condition of the body or mind (impairment) that makes it more difficult for the person with the condition to do certain activities (activity limitation) and interact with the world around them (participation restrictions),” such as impairments in hearing, vision, cognition, mobility, social relationships, communication, and/or self-care142 |
| Sexual harassment | “Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual's employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual's work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment”103,143 |
| Technical standards | “A statement by a medical school of the (1) essential academic and nonacademic abilities, attributes, and characteristics in the areas of intellectual conceptual, integrative, and quantitative abilities; (2) observational skills; (3) physical abilities; (4) motor functioning; (5) emotional stability; (6) behavioral and social skills; and (7) ethics and professionalism that a medical school applicant or enrolled medical student must possess or be able to acquire, with or without reasonable accommodation, in order to be admitted to, be retained in, and graduate from that school's medical educational program”144 |
| Triple aim | A framework developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement that describes an approach to optimizing health system performance through simultaneous pursuit of improvement in patients' experience of care (including quality and satisfaction), population health, and reduction in the per capita cost of health care145 |
| URM | Underrepresented in medicine; defined by the AAMC as “those racial and ethnic populations that are underrepresented in the medical profession relative to their numbers in the general population”25 and was used before 2003 as the acronym for underrepresented minorities, “which consisted of Blacks, Mexican-Americans, Native Americans (i.e., American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians), and mainland Puerto Ricans”25 |