Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

InForm is a tool to help the UConn community navigate the reporting process and support available for a variety of incidents including bias, harassment, safety concerns, and other types of misconduct.

UConn Bias Incident Summary

Students created the Future Nurses for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion student organization. The group is dedicated to the mission of creating diversity, equity, and inclusion within health care as a service and in the workplace. Group members intend to create a community of underrepresented students and allies varying between ethnicity, race, country of origin, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, cultural practices, religious affiliations, etc., so that they can acknowledge and appreciate individual experiences as they affect practices. They are creating this opportunity to influence the School's social atmosphere and to educate each other so that they may all respect varying experiences and views, making them better professionals in the future equipped with empathy, understanding, and knowledge for their interactions with patients and coworkers. The group's activities include social and educational events (i.e. keynote speakers), as well as, volunteer opportunities for clinical work in communities that are affected by the very systemic inequities that we plan to learn about. The organization is nursing-focused/School of Nursing affiliated but is open to all health care majors.

School of Nursing faculty, staff, current students, and recent graduates were invited to fill out a Diversity, Engagement Survey, which contained 22 questions consisting of eight factors that connect engagement theory to inclusion and diversity constructs. All responses on the survey are scored on a five-point Likert scale, with five corresponding to strongly agree and one to strongly disagree. Email invitations to participate in the survey were sent to 1,076 faculty, staff, and students. Around 572 responded and 511 completed the survey in its entirety.

The School received an overall score of four, indicating students, faculty, and staff feel engaged and included. This scoring pattern was similar across all races and ethnicities in students. A few outliers scored the School at a one or a two; open-ended questions at the end of the survey revealed that those participants chose those scores based on racial incidents on campus from a few years ago.

As a result of the survey, we discussed the importance of addressing racial trauma as incidents occur to ensure a sense of safety in students. We also knew from anecdotal data that some students didn't participate in the survey and didn't feel comfortable sharing their thoughts on the survey. Therefore, we hired an outside facilitator to administer a Restorative Healing workshop during the spring of 2022.

The School of Nursing faculty approve removing the physics requirement for undergraduate nursing students. This change applied to students who admitted in fall 2022.

Faculty and staff underwent implicit bias training through Project Implicit. The nonprofit is committed to challenging organizational and institutional disparities through data-driven research and aims to educate the public about bias. During the training sessions, faculty and staff explored perceptual, social, and decision-making biases; learned about bias in action; and were taught how to reduce the impact of bias.