The Urology Care Foundation™ (UCF) continues its ongoing focus on the prioritization of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). We believe that embedding DEI initiatives within all of our education, research, and humanitarian programs is essential to our global vision. To that end, I recently spoke with Dr Courtney Rowe, chair of the UCF Public Education Council (PEC), on the PEC’s work and how they’re keeping DEI at the forefront of their efforts to improve health care for urologic patients and caregivers worldwide.

What Is the UCF PEC?

Rowe: We provide patients, caregivers, and health care providers with accurate and up-to-date information about urologic health issues. The PEC and its committees help the Foundation develop patient education materials as well as identify various digital, print, and media dissemination platforms to improve communication between patients and their health care providers. We produce a wide range of educational materials: videos, podcasts, patient guides, fact sheets, interactive tools, websites, and more. We cover the entire spectrum of urology and all stages of disease and condition management.

How Does UCF Ensure DEI With Patient Education?

Rowe: The PEC and its committees implement DEI in many ways. Members of the Council and its committees reflect a diverse and inclusive group of volunteers striving to reflect all genders, as well as diversity in age, race, specialty area, geographic location, and professional experience or tenure. When specifically developing patient education materials, the Foundation strives to be reflective of the global populations we serve. We develop patient education materials at an eighth-grade reading level as a way to ensure materials are linguistically appropriate and culturally competent. Translated patient education is also important as the Foundation offers 10 languages other than English with a heavy focus on the Spanish language to ensure up-to-date and reliable education is always found on our website. When disseminating patient education, we do target a diverse audience, including but not limited to underserved or vulnerable populations.

What Are the PEC’s Future Plans for DEI?

Rowe: We continue to address DEI and disparities in care within the scope of patient education and plan to include this as an important area of focus. As such, we have already developed a Spanish work group and plan to stand up a DEI patient education work group as part of the Council. This group will help ensure the Foundation develops appropriate patient education materials and will help identify various new opportunities to improve communication between patients and their health care providers. The vision of this work group is to be the leader in improving health care for urologic patients and caregivers worldwide by providing education using health literacy techniques resulting in easy-to-digest information appropriate for those with diverse racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national, cultural, religious, age, (dis)ability, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The mission of the PEC DEI work group is to serve as a consultative body, working with the Foundation patient education team, to help guide strategic direction for patient education development and outreach, as well as to serve as a resource for the development, review, and oversight of the Foundation patient education materials.

Thank you, Dr Rowe, for building on the important efforts of the prior PEC leaders and members. The work of the PEC is foundational to the efforts of the UCF.