Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Values Statement
Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and Reconciliation will be intentionally infused throughout all facets of the Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) School of Medicine, including: admissions; faculty and staff recruitment; educational programming; the learning environment; curriculum; Scholarly, Research and Creative (SRC) activities; enterprise; and patient, family, and community engagement. In this way, we will continually foster a culture of inclusion and engagement and advance social justice. The TMU School of Medicine will be the first medical school in Canada founded and intentionally built upon the foundations of social accountability, EDI and Reconciliation.
The TMU School of Medicine is dedicated to improving the health and well-being of individuals, families and communities across Ontario and Canada, with a focus on the primary care needs of diverse and medically underserved populations, through community-engaged education, scholarship and service. We are committed to educating students to become compassionate, respectful and future-ready clinicians who provide outstanding holistic health care and who lead in health system transformation. We strive for equity in all that we do. We commit to Truth, Reconciliation, anti-racism, and justice to achieve inclusion and optimal health for all.
At the TMU School of Medicine, we reject deficit-based approaches to EDI. Instead, we locate the barriers to EDI in systems and structures of exclusion, rather than in individual deficits. This means that understanding the structural roots of inequality, such as the social determinants of health, is essential to advancing EDI and to approaching health challenges. It also means centering approaches like the social model of disability, which highlights that people are disabled by barriers in their environments and in society, rather than by their differences. Drawing on social justice and anti-oppressive practice, we work to acknowledge, understand and challenge systems of power that privilege some groups over others. We also take an explicitly anti-racist perspective, with a particular sensitivity to the unique historical and ongoing contexts of anti-Black racism and anti-Indigenous racism.