For example, many minority doctors wind up going into primary care and returning to the communities they came from, helping to treat people who otherwise might not be able to find a physician, said Marc Nivet, chief diversity officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges.
Some studies have shown that patients can relate better to doctors who look like them, said Dr. Laura Riley, an obstetrician who is director of Labor and Delivery at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. She also wrote an accompanying commentary to the study. She is not related to the ACP’s Riley.
“Sometimes there really is that connection that can make a difficult conversation or circumstance a little less difficult,” she said.
Other research has found that doctors from the same racial and ethnic group as a patient may be more sensitive to the issues that a patient faces, Nivet said.
For example, they can design medication schedules or treatment protocols that patients are more likely to stick with, because they’ve taken into account the background of the patient, he said.
Doctors from different racial and ethnic groups also increase the cultural competency of all the doctors around them, helping them better understand the different circumstances of patients, he added.
“It gives all physicians an opportunity to raise their level of cultural competence, because they have peers who are different,” Nivet said.
Women have successfully made inroads into medicine, the study showed. For example, women now represent 48 percent of medical school graduates and 46 percent of trainees in graduate medical education, the study found.
Women also are the majority in seven specialties among graduate medical education trainees, including obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, dermatology, family medicine and pathology, researchers revealed.
A number of roadblocks remain for minorities, starting with the primary education they receive.
With A Shortage Of Black Doctors, Who Will Care For Black People? was originally published on blackdoctor.org
