Building Diversity in a Complex Academic Health Center (original) (raw)
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Diversity in academic medicine no. 1 case for minority faculty development today
Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine: A Journal of Translational and Personalized Medicine, 2008
For the past 20 years, the percentage of the American population consisting of nonwhite minorities has been steadily increasing. By 2050, these nonwhite minorities, taken together, are expected to become the majority. Meanwhile, despite almost 50 years of efforts to increase the representation of minorities in the healthcare professions, such representation remains grossly deficient. Among the underrepresented minorities are African and Hispanic Americans; Native Americans, Alaskans, and Pacific Islanders (including Hawaiians); and certain Asians (including Hmong, Vietnamese, and Cambodians). The underrepresentation of underrepresented minorities in the healthcare professions has a profoundly negative effect on public health, including serious racial and ethnic health disparities. These can be reduced only by increased recruitment and development of both underrepresented minority medical students and underrepresented minority medical school administrators and faculty. Underrepresented minority faculty development is deterred by barriers resulting from years of systematic segregation, discrimination, tradition, culture, and elitism in academic medicine. If these barriers can be overcome, the rewards will be great: improvements in public health, an expansion of the contemporary medical research agenda, and improvements in the teaching of both underrepresented minority and non-underrepresented minority students. Mt Sinai J Med 75:491-498, 2008. 2008 Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Medical education online, 2016
To assess the impact of medical school location in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and Puerto Rico (PR) on the proportion of underrepresented minorities in medicine (URMM) and women hired in faculty and leadership positions at academic medical institutions. AAMC 2013 faculty roster data for allopathic medical schools were used to compare the racial/ethnic and gender composition of faculty and chair positions at medical schools located within HBCU and PR to that of other medical schools in the United States. Data were compared using independent sample t-tests. Women were more highly represented in HBCU faculty (mean HBCU 43.5% vs. non-HBCU 36.5%, p=0.024) and chair (mean HBCU 30.1% vs. non-HBCU 15.6%, p=0.005) positions and in PR chair positions (mean PR 38.23% vs. non-PR 15.38%, p=0.016) compared with other allopathic institutions. HBCU were associated with increased African American representation in faculty (mean HBCU 59.5% vs. non-HBCU 2.6%, p=0.011) and chair...
Race, Disadvantage and Faculty Experiences in Academic Medicine
2010
BACKGROUND: Despite compelling reasons to draw on the contributions of under-represented minority (URM) faculty members, US medical schools lack these faculty, particularly in leadership and senior roles. OBJECTIVE: The study's purpose was to document URM faculty perceptions and experience of the culture of academic medicine in the US and to raise awareness of obstacles to achieving the goal of having people of color in positions of leadership in academic medicine. DESIGN: The authors conducted a qualitative interview study in 2006-2007 of faculty in five US medical schools chosen for their diverse regional and organizational attributes. PARTICIPANTS: Using purposeful sampling of medical faculty, 96 faculty were interviewed from four different career stages (early, plateaued, leaders and left academic medicine) and diverse specialties with an oversampling of URM faculty. APPROACH: We identified patterns and themes emergent in the coded data. Analysis was inductive and data driven. RESULTS: Predominant themes underscored during analyses regarding the experience of URM faculty were: difficulty of cross-cultural relationships; isolation and feeling invisible; lack of mentoring, role models and social capital; disrespect, overt and covert bias/ discrimination; different performance expectations related to race/ethnicity; devaluing of research on community health care and health disparities; the unfair burden of being identified with affirmative action and responsibility for diversity efforts; leadership's role in diversity goals; and financial hardship. CONCLUSIONS: Achieving an inclusive culture for diverse medical school faculty would help meet the mission of academic medicine to train a physician and research workforce that meets the disparate needs of our multicultural society. Medical school leaders need to value the inclusion of URM faculty. Failure to fully engage the skills and insights of URM faculty impairs our ability to provide the best science, education or medical care.
Health equity, 2018
The Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program (AMFDP), a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, seeks to support academic physicians from historically disadvantaged backgrounds and serves as a model program for promoting faculty diversity and health equity. Our objective was to determine differences in scientific productivity, promotions and retentions, and leadership attainment among faculty applicants to this national minority faculty development program. Final-round interview applicants from 2003 to 2008 were selected. Differences in publications, grants, promotions/retentions, and leadership positions through 2013 were compared between funded scholars and unfunded nonscholars. Semistructured interviews were conducted to identify factors that facilitated and hindered academic success. A total of 124 applicants (76 scholars and 48 nonscholars) who participated in final-round interviews from 2003 to 2008 were eligible. Scholars and nonscholars had similar num...
Diversity in academic medicine no. 5 successful programs in minority faculty development: overview
Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine: A Journal of Translational and Personalized Medicine, 2008
Despite recent drastic cutbacks in federal funding for programs to diversify academic medicine, many such programs survive and continue to set examples for others of how to successfully increase the participation of minorities underrepresented in the healthcare professions and, in particular, how to increase physician and nonphysician minority medical faculty. This article provides an overview of such programs, including those in historically black colleges and universities, minority-serving institutions, research-intensive private and public medical schools, and more primary care-oriented public medical schools. Although the models for faculty development developed by these successful schools overlap, each has unique features worthy of consideration by other schools seeking to develop programs of their own. The ingredients of success are discussed in detail in another article in this theme issue of the Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine, "Successful Programs in Minority Faculty Development: Ingredients of Success."
Gastroenterology, 2010
Pacific Islander) among US medical school faculty is markedly low when compared with their respective percent representation of the US population. Women URMs are doubly underrepresented, particularly as the academic rank advances from the instructor to the professor level, and gender discrepancies occur more prominently among white female faculty. Although the percent of white faculty has decreased over the past 5 years, the low percentage of black and Hispanic faculty has not changed proportionately. Furthermore, the 2008 -2009 pipeline of URM trainees is unlikely to reverse the current trends. Several measures are suggested for consideration by medical schools and the National Institutes of Health, and recommendations that URM faculty and students may wish to consider are also discussed. The major issues to address include increasing the pipeline of predoctoral URMs, promoting the success and retention of junior URM faculty, enhancing the support of senior URM faculty to serve as needed mentors, and building a pool of URM and non-URM mentors for URM trainees. Therefore, issues pertaining to both the pipeline and the pipe need to be overcome.
Increasing Racial and Ethnic Diversity at the University of Utah Physician Assistant Program
Family Medicine, 2021
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Among the oldest in the nation, the Uni- versity of Utah Physician Assistant Program (UPAP) serves the state of Utah and surrounding areas and is a division of the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine. Recognizing the need to produce health care provid- ers from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, UPAP instituted structural changes to improve student compositional diversity. This paper is a presen- tation and evaluation of the changes made to determine their relationship with compositional diversity, ultimate practice setting, and national rankings. METHODS: UPAP changed diversity messaging, curriculum, efforts in ad- missions, recruitment, and retention to improve the representation of Black, Latinx, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander students, as well as those from educationally and economically dis- advantaged backgrounds. RESULTS: UPAP tripled the number of underrepresented minority matricu- lated students over the course of five admitted classes, while simultaneously increasing the proportion of students from educationally or economically dis- advantaged backgrounds. UPAP maintains both high boards pass rate and top national rankings, (number two ranking in public physician assistant pro- gram and number four overall program in the United States). CONCLUSIONS: The UPAP experience demonstrates that intentional diver- sity efforts are associated with improvement in racial/ethnic diversity and national rankings. Other medical school graduate programs, specifically the medical doctor (MD), public health, and basic science programs can use this model to improve their compositional diversity.
Underrepresented minorities in academic medicine: is Florida better off?
Southern medical journal, 2014
The state of Florida has experienced challenges recruiting and retaining underrepresented minority faculty in academic medicine, as well as maintaining a population-like balance of minority physicians practicing in the state. We sought to quantify the percentage of practicing minority physicians as compared to the general population of Florida and focus specifically on black, Hispanic, and Asian/Pacific Islander physicians in academic medicine. We hypothesized that because of the diversity of the state, the number of underrepresented minority academic physicians in Florida would be higher than the national average. Data were derived and analyzed from a biennial survey initiated in 2007 that all physicians renewing licenses in Florida are required to complete. Fifty percent of the licensing cohort completes the survey annually. We focused on physician practice demographics and academic employment. Blacks make up 15.4% of the state population, 6.4% of practicing physicians, but only 3...