Boosting minority care: Role models in medicine

An AMA initiative is sending physicians back to school -- this time to encourage minority students to consider a medical career.

Editorial. March 11, 2002.

African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans make up just under a quarter of the U.S. population and are expected to make up more than a third by 2030. But only 7% of physicians are from one of these minority groups.

Further, some segments of these minority populations are recognized as having some of the nation's most pervasive health problems, compounded by limited access to care. When care is available, it sometimes is provided by physicians who do not speak the patient's language nor understand the patient's cultural background.

An obvious solution, of course, is to increase the numbers of minority physicians, but this is proving to be a difficult task. Medical education data from current years illustrate the problem. There were 15,901 medical graduates in the class of 2001. Of that number only 1,118, about 7%, were African-American. Hispanics, including Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans and others, totaled 960, roughly 6%. There were 109 Native Americans/Alaska natives, less than 1% of the class.

The short-term future is no brighter. Among the 16,813 first-year medical students in the class of 2000-2001 the number from underrepresented minority groups totaled 1,862, down from 2,041 in the class that entered medical school a year before.

The problem is hardly a new one. The AMA has long been on record in support of a variety of measures to increase the numbers of minorities applying to and attending medical school, and to improving minorities' access to health care services. Recent steps include support for innovative programs strengthening premedical and precollege preparation for minority students; and encouraging medical schools to consider the likelihood of service to underserved populations as a medical school admissions criterion. Various incentive programs at the state and federal level have attempted to address the situation, with limited success to date. [...]