Prioritizing equity and inclusion in global health dermatology

Prioritizing equity and inclusion in global health dermatologyIn recent months, there have been accelerated efforts to address the lack of equity and inclusion in global health.The Decolonize Global Health movement (@KarolinskaDGH, 2020; Duke Decolonizing Global Health Working Group, 2020; Harvard Chan Student Committee for the Decolonization of Public Health, 2020; University of Michigan School of Public Health, 2020), which emerged in 2018 to 2019 and has gained significant traction since then, urges global health practitioners to examine the colonial roots of global health (Greene et al., 2013), identify how colonialism persists in global health today (Kumar, 2020), and work as individuals, organizations, and institutions to prioritize equity and inclusion in global health (Büyüm et al., 2020;Eichbaum et al., 2020;Lawrence and Hirsch, 2020; Pai, 2019a Pai, , 2019b)).Decolonizing global health has been prioritized by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Fogarty International Center (Glass, 2020), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, 2020), Global Health Council (Global Health Council, 2020), other nonprofit organizations, and numerous academic institutions.Dermatologists are engaged in all aspects of global health work: research, training, and direct care delivery.Herein, we highlight key issues in these three domains in the context of transnational work involving individuals, organizations, and institutions in high-income countries (HICs) and low-and middle-income countries (LMICs).Through careful examination, we identify the ways in which dermatology has contributed to upholding structural inequities, think critically about solutions for dismantling these structures, and recommend actions to decolonize global health dermatology by prioritizing equity and inclusion. ResearchGlobal health research involves the process of conceptualizing studies, securing funding, obtaining regulatory approvals, collecting and analyzing data, and disseminating findings.Funding for global health research has grown steadily in the last several decades (Sridhar, 2012), and the vast majority of funding comes from institutions in the Global North (Boum et al., 2018), which refers to the generally more developed countries in the Northern Hemisphere compared with the generally less developed countries in the Southern Hemisphere (i.e., Global South), but this is an imperfect categorization (Royal Geographical Society, 2013).Importantly, funders ultimately determine the beneficiaries of money, the targets of their interventions, and the research deliverables.