Wilderness Medical Associates (WMA) International is dedicated to providing inclusive, supportive, and welcoming learning environments. We also acknowledge that in the outdoor, medical, and educational fields, many populations of students and professionals have been historically underrepresented and underserved, and therefore alienated from these fields, including: lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer people (LGBTQ+), Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian people and individuals with diverse abilities, and others.
WMA International is committed to better serving all our students.
We recognize that our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a journey and not a destination, and that we are just beginning to intentionally do this necessary and valuable work. With the support of new leadership and a new vision, we are committed to providing the best wilderness medicine curriculum in the most inclusive way possible.
In the last 12 months, we have completed the following commitments and actions to serve our mission, and will continue to add to this list as we expand our DEI efforts:
- Provided Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training for our instructors; Instructors that participated in this training have the following symbol in their bio on our website to indicate their commitment to inclusive instruction:
- Committed to building a more diverse instructor community and increased representation of instructors who identify as members of the LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities. See our job description for instructors here.
- Committed to refining our texts and instruction to train WMA graduates to provide quality medical care to all, including members of historically underrepresented communities; In 2021, we edited written curriculum and texts:
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- to include gender neutral language and remove unnecessary emphasis or references to “sex.”
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- to increase the representation of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian people, and others in our texts and slides.
- to include images of various conditions (ex. hives, rashes) on all skin tones.
- Edited our patient reporting note (SOAP note) to be gender inclusive.
We appreciate your support and contributions as we define and work towards our DEI goals and welcome feedback and suggestions from our WMA International community. Please send all questions and ideas to: .