Project to help students recognize, respond to microaggressions

Assistant Clinical Professor Tiffany Nielsen (center) instructs Doctor of Nursing Practice-Family Nurse Practitioner students on conducting physical examinations.

Assistant Clinical Professor Tiffany Nielsen is a member of a research team dedicated to helping students recognize, respond to, and prevent microaggressions in the clinical setting. 

“READ What is SAID: An Inter-professional Approach to Clinical Assessment,” seeks to give Susan & Henry Samueli College of Health Sciences students the empathy, awareness, and communication skills they need to recognize and confront discrimination in ways that supports the needs of both the patient and provider. 

To educate the interprofessional student teams, professional actors called standardized patients are used. The actors role-play a variety of scenarios during clinical examinations, which are observed by instructors. The students’ interactions, decisions, and thought processes are then evaluated and discussed.

The UCI Office of Inclusive Excellence Confronting Extremism Program is funding the project.

Team members

Julie Youm, assistant dean for Education Compliance and Quality at the School of Medicine, is the project lead. Other team members:

• Khanh-Van Le-Bucklin (co-lead), vice dean, Medical Education
• Xavier Hernandez, Diversity and Inclusion Programs officer
• Warren Wiechmann, associate professor, School of Medicine
• Alisa Wray, associate residency director, School of Medicine
• Sarah McBane, clinical professor, School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences
• David Timberlake, associate professor, Program in Public Health

About the Confronting Extremism Program

The Confronting Extremism Program, founded by Chief Diversity Officer Douglas Haynes,  seeks to forge dialogues and support inquiry and evidence-based practices aligned to campus values. The program launched in 2017, in response to a growing number of acts of terror based on extremist ideologies reported around the world. US colleges and universities have been the sites of nearly 800 hate-motivated crimes.

Students will participate in the form of an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) in spring 2022. The group’s outcomes are scheduled to be submitted in fall 2022.