Purpose
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has become an important guiding principle in medical schools. Despite broad commitments to DEI-informed student experiences, little is known about how DEI is actually scoped and taught across an entire curriculum- preclinical through to clinical. Thus, it is challenging to assess future physicians’ DEI competence. This abstract presents an empirical study to thoroughly describe DEI curricular implementation from the medical student perspective, capturing potential challenges of learning clinically-integrated DEI.

Methods
Two waves of in-depth, phenomenological interviews were conducted in 2023 with six medical students (n=2 in preclinical, n=4 in clinical phase) in one United States medical school. Interviews elicited detailed descriptions of students’ perceptions of DEI and firsthand accounts of potential DEI implementation sites (e.g., classroom and clinic interactions, studying with provided materials). Analysis focused on stability and dynamism within the phenomenon of DEI curricular implementation throughout the four years.

Results
Constructing the lived phenomenon of DEI through curriculum via student accounts revealed a number of challenges, especially for scaffolding DEI from basic science into clinical learning. First, students expressed frustration when DEI was treated as a domain of knowledge to acquire, but not instructed or assessed as such in the preclinical years. Second, in the clinical years, students sought structure to integrate their knowledge, but felt underprepared to apply scientific knowledge in their physical and affective encounters with patients. It became clear that the educational framework of embodiment could explain disjunctures students faced while searching for clinically relevant knowledge and dissatisfaction with teaching tools such as slides and cases. Embodiment’s ecological perspective and five domains revealed where and how DEI was lacking attention in the curriculum.

Conclusion
Gaps in students’ curricular-prompted, dis-embodied DEI highlighted room to rethink common educational tools. Embodiment could structure a DEI framework to assess and inform more clinically-integrated, patient-centric curriculum.