The Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Office is proud to officially launch its Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion (EDI) Style Guide.
The EDI style guide is a document that will facilitate the use of a consistent style of equitable and inclusive language across the faculty and its three schools. The guide is also designed to ensure that writers and speakers are using the most up-to-date inclusive language.
In publishing this guide, learners, healthcare professionals, faculty, and staff at FHS will learn to how to equitably communicate about issue regarding race, gender, sexual orientation, and other intersecting identities.
“Building confidence in using the right language is incredibly important for healthcare providers and health scientists,” says Jane Philpott, Dean, Faculty of Health Sciences. “This guide will be an important instrument to have in our toolkit as we train health professionals to provide high quality care to all patients and to ensure that the Faculty of Health Sciences is a safe and inclusive place in which to work and learn.”
Using an incorrect or inappropriate term which relates to a person from an equity-deserving community can be deeply hurtful to the person on the receiving end of the comment. These incidents – microaggressions – happen frequently in the workplace and in healthcare settings.
The EDI Style Guide was put together using up-to-date references and was reviewed by a diversity of experts across Queen’s University. “It is a living document, and it will be updated as language evolves and changes. We encourage our community members to bookmark it and visit it frequently,” says Giselle Valarezo, Manager, Office of EDI at FHS. “We want to ensure that everyone in the Faculty of Health Sciences feels empowered to converse with to and write about marginalized groups in a respectful way.”
The EDI Style Guide is the first of many tools that will be released by the Office of EDI in order to support a larger cultural change – towards equity and inclusion – across the faculty.
View the EDI Style Guide
Visit the FHS EDI website
For questions about the EDI Style Guide, please email Giselle Valarezo: valarezo@queensu.ca