Building Trust & Equity in Internal Medicine: One Brooklyn Health

In April, our team had the opportunity to visit One Brooklyn Health (OBH) and witness firsthand how they are training residents to provide patient-centered and responsive care.

Supported by the Building Trust: Advancing Health Equity program, Sophia Kostelanetz, MD, and Predrag “Pedja” Stojicic, MD, MPH, in collaboration with their community partner, Mr. Bruce Richard, have developed a thoughtful health equity curriculum specifically tailored for OBH’s resident physicians and the patients they serve.

Contextually Relevant Curriculum

At the beginning of our visit, we had an opportunity to sit down and chat with Dr. Kostelanetz. She shared that most OBH resident physicians are international medical graduates working with Brooklyn’s safety-net population, many of whom rely on Medicaid.

With this unique context in mind, the OBH team crafted a curriculum that integrates policy, strategy, and the lived experiences of both trainees and patients. Dr. Kostelanetz has worked hard to build trust within and across OBH to secure organizational support for this work.

Leaders from external affairs and the Associate Director of Nursing at OBH participated in the trainings — a testament to OBH’s commitment to embedding health equity across the entire organization.

Community Collaboration

The OBH team hasn’t just built meaningful collaborations within their organization, but also with the greater Brooklyn community. This includes hiring a local production manager to record the training sessions and partnering closely with Bruce Richard, a trusted community leader whose input has helped shape the health equity curriculum.

“This work isn’t just about training physicians. It’s about human beings responding to the enormous challenge of preventable and premature death. We are moving more into an era that values the necessity of community members being intricately involved in problem solving, strategizing and shaping the health of the community in which they live.”
— Mr. Bruce Richard

Training in Action

During our visit, we saw the OBH team in action. The training session we attended was interactive, engaging, and deeply reflective, even as it tackled weighty issues like Medicaid policy, disparities in care, and power dynamics in effective community organizing and building teams.

Resident physicians reflected on their own personal growth, sharing that after completing the curriculum, they felt more comfortable speaking up and advocating on behalf of their patients and themselves.

At the end of the session, Dr. Kostelanetz asked residents to reflect on their four training sessions and draw an image capturing their experiences. Many chose to illustrate connections between each other, their teams, and their patients. While many expressed hopefulness about how they would better advocate for patients in the future because of the training, there was also concern and trepidation, particularly around potential federal health care cuts that would impact their patients and OBH.

One Brooklyn Health is an excellent model for what equity-centered medical training can look like; they embed equity, community, and shared purpose at every step.