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A recurring theme: The need for minority physicians
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PERSPECTIVE
Achieving adequate numbers of physicians to meet future population needs requires recruitment from diverse populations.
ABSTRACT: There is compelling evidence for the need to increase diversity within the physician workforce to ensure high-quality medical education, access to health care for the underserved, advances in research, and improved business performance. To have enough physicians to meet the future needs of the general public, as well as of minority citizens, we must recruit from diverse populations. The need for physicians, particularly underrepresented minorities, will continue to grow. Addressing shortages requires inventive efforts to counter obstacles created by the anti-affirmative action movement, as well as strategies to encourage institutions to become more engaged in diversity efforts.
RICHARD COOPER POSITS that physician supply will not meet future demand for physician services. His historical review of U.S. medical schools reveals two primary mechanisms for enlarging medical school capacity: increasing class size or establishing new medical schools. Both approaches, coupled with affirmative-action measures, have raised the numbers of underrepresented minority matriculants to medical schools during the past thirty-five years. However, these mechanisms are likely to have only a limited impact on workforce requirements in the near future, because of the need to garner political support for financing in constrained economic times, limitations in the pool of qualified applicants, an anti-affirmative action political climate, and the time required to achieve major change.
* Past minority enrollment. Past efforts to increase minority enrollment in U.S. medical schools fall into four phases: "social activism," from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s; "stagnation," from 1974 to 1990; renewal, from 1990 to 1995; and anti-affirmative action, beginning in 1996.1
In 1964 only 0.5 percent of the students enrolled in eighty-one of the eighty-three U.S. medical schools were black. Two medical schools, Howard and Meharry, accounted for the other...