Developing a framework to address health equity and racism within pharmacy education: Rx-HEART.

Objectives. The objectives of this paper are to summarize the inclusion of health equity and anti-racism education in published literature and use it to identify current gaps across the pharmacy curriculum, define the key health equity and anti-racism concepts that are suggested to be included across the pharmacy curriculum, and recommend a framework with steps to integrate health equity and anti-racism education across the pharmacy curriculum. Findings. Other professions such as social work, nursing, and medicine have taken steps to address social injustice by integrating anti-racism into their curriculum. The National Association of Social Worker (NASW) advocates for “social justice, and social change with and on behalf of clients”, and included racism and health equity in its mission to eradicate “discrimination, oppression, poverty, and other forms of social injustice.” The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) curricular standards for baccalaureate nursing education provided four key changes for immediate change in the curriculum to overcome structural, individual, and ideological racism (SIIR). In October 2020, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) released a four-pillar framework to address racism. Summary. The pharmacy profession must follow suit in the efforts to eradicate social injustices by incorporating into its curriculum topics that would result in the graduation of culturally and linguistically sensitive, and structurally competent pharmacists. This five-phased framework, Rx-HEART (Pharmacy Health Equity Anti-Racism Training) aims to provide guidance to the pharmacy academy on how to accomplish the set objectives of this paper and of the themed issue on social injustice.