After months of reflection, research, consulting with the anatomy community, and preparation, Primal Pictures is proud to release our Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) pledge and roadmap. This is the first step toward initiating change in a field that too often has roots in misguided and harmful worldviews that can be hundreds of years old.
Our goal is to meaningfully improve EDI within our resources on our Anatomy.tv platform to support the anatomy education community.
Why do we need to improve EDI?
Primal is against discrimination, bigotry and prejudice in all forms, and our products should reflect this. We have reviewed everything created in our 30+ year history as a UK-based company to ensure all content is representative of these values and to foster inclusivity. While most reflect our values, we unfortunately found that some fall short. As a result, we created an EDI pledge to affirm our commitment to improvements that we feel we can have positive influence over, as a supplier of digital online anatomy resources.
Why a Pledge?
A pledge is a promise or commitment to take action. EDI isn’t about a quick fix; it is a commitment to long-term change. We would like to tackle everything immediately, but some improvements will take time. A pledge seemed an ideal way to hold us accountable to show what we are currently working on, but what we still want and intend to achieve in the future.
We also want to give our customers the confidence that we fully appreciate the challenges they face when it comes to overcoming barriers in EDI in education, and create a platform where issues can be discussed and input can be given to create a resource that is collective, valuable and useful.
Our Pledge and Roadmap
To understand how we could improve our products we researched more than 75 resources to educate ourselves on the issues. From this, we have prioritized four topics in our pledge: sex and gender, decolonization, accessibility, and age and body size. Across these topics, we discuss 18 issues from our research, our current status on how our products tackle these issues and where we can take action to make our solutions a more positive experience for all. Accordingly, our roadmap will track what changes are live, and updates currently in progress or in future planning. The 31 action points include improving accessibility, updating 3D models, expanding and revising text, incorporating more clinical conditions and case studies, and more. Some examples of our actions are below:
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- Rebuild the skin microanatomy model to better represent the cellular components that produce variation in skin pigmentation.
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- Replace eponyms with anatomical terms, and use parenthesis after to reference (but give less value to) the eponym. Above example: “Cerebral arterial circle (eponym Circle of Willis)”
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- Re-record our Anatomy Learning Outcomes for Medicine introductory video to the pelvis to provide a greater discussion around sex and gender for guidance and commentary.
It’s important to us that the actions we are proposing will be useful within anatomy education, and community input is a vital part of this process. Therefore, we would love any feedback and suggestions on our pledged improvements. A feedback form can be found at the end of our pledge.
This is a commitment to long-term change, and will evolve over the coming years as we learn and grow. Thank you!
We would like to recognize everyone who has provided feedback so far, including the Anatomy Collective for Equality and the Anatomical Society’s EDI committee, and to the authors of ‘Equality pledges: A novel approach to embedding EDI and promoting positive culture change in a UK university’ for inspiring our pledge.