The Healthcare Education Racial Microaggressions Scale: a brief measure of the frequency of racial microaggressions experienced by health profession trainees of color

Microaggressions are an insidious form of racism where members of the white dominant group convey covert hostility towards people of color. Evidence suggests that microaggressions do occur in healthcare education settings, but it relies on ad hoc scales that may limit their generalizability thereby complicating an effort to study and intervene systematically. Data from two national samples of healthcare trainees are leveraged to investigate the factor structure of the HERMS. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis supported a nine-item correlated factors structure with two latent factors representing microinvalidations and microinsults. The screener developed in the current study identifies key microaggressions experienced by healthcare trainees of color.