The Office of Health Equity (OHE) serves as an institutional home for nurturing and catalyzing educational, research, clinical, and operational initiatives and partnerships to address and prevent health inequities.
We create partnerships to improve community and population health and advance health equity.
We foster research that addresses health inequities, facilitate academic/community partnerships, and provide trainings around community-engaged research.
We collectively acknowledge that VUMC’s Office of Health Equity occupies the ancestral and traditional Lands of the Cherokee, Yuchi, and Shawnee peoples. We in the Office of Health Equity are grappling with this history and recognize that this acknowledgement is insufficient to address the harm inflicted on these communities. We are striving to learn more about Native American and Indigenous history in the Nashville region and to celebrate these communities today. We in the Office of Health Equity are committed to a lifetime of antiracist work. Understanding the history of Native American communities is central to this work and we will continually strive to include and center the voices of Tennessee's Native communities in our efforts.
For more information on developing land acknowledgments, please see these resources - which helped inspire our statement above.
- A guide to Indigenous land acknowledgment - Native Governance Center
- Native American and Indigenous Initiatives & Land Acknowledgment - Northwestern University
- Five Steps to Writing A Land Acknowledgment - Care About Climate
Vanderbilt University Medical Center's Office of Health Equity's plan for confronting racial inequities provides a guide for discussion and implementation of changes at the Medical Center. Learn more.
The Office of Health Equity (OHE) welcomes innovative ideas that advance health equity across the VUMC community and beyond. If you would like to submit an idea for our Office to review, please click here. We review submissions regularly.
Contact us at OHEinfo@vumc.org
Follow us on Twitter @VUMCHlthEquity