Racial and ethnic diversity and equality have always been an issue in higher education. When it comes to exposure and opportunity to be able to afford higher education and build the skills necessary to make a good candidate, more privileged demographics will always be put at an advantage.
It then is no surprise that the American Heart Association (AHA) releases an article about different barriers that stand in the way of having a diverse workforce of healthcare workers. They emphasize it as a systemic problem while providing statistics about the racial demographics and solutions to making the profiles of healthcare workers more reflective of the communities they serve.
Within this article, Dr. Haynes highlights the importance of having a diverse set of healthcare workers. Having a physician that understands and can empathize with lived social and healthcare experiences improves patient interactions and treatment outcomes. This is especially important in cardiology, as cardiovascular diseases disproportionately affect underrepresented racial groups.
To provide some statistical insight, Black and Hispanic people make up around 13% and 17% of the population, respectively. However, those groups only make up around 5% and 6% of physicians. This makes finding and being treated by such a physician extremely rare. The importance of making these percentages closer to one another is not because any demographic makes for a better healthcare provider than another, but because of shared understandings from a social perspective. Someone with a similar cultural background may be able to offer healthier and familiar foods to a patient trying to healthily loose weight, as an example. If there is a shared understanding, patients are more likely to trust and follow the advice of their providers which allows for better treatment results.
Image of patient and physician
Image Source: Joe Raedle
To fix this problem, it is vital to look at medical school and admissions where students begin their training as physicians. Even though the number of applicants increases drastically, the percentages of admitted students of color do not according to the AHA’s article.
It has been pointed out that what limits underrepresented students from becoming physicians starts from as early as elementary school. Young children who are disadvantaged have less exposure and mentorship in these healthcare fields. It has also been shown that standardized testing greatly favors more privileged students, not just for the MCAT (for admission into medical school) but also into college through the SAT and ACT.
The article comes to a conclusion that in order for the lack of diversity in medicine to change, everyone within the healthcare system needs to change. It is not simply the responsibility of students of color to overcome the barriers put in place in an already competitive field, but also from a systemic side in regards to boards of admissions and healthcare committees through which more noticeable and important change may occur.
