What can medical schools do now to ensure a diverse clinician workforce?
Introduced in the wake of the civil rights movement in the US, affirmative action policies were intended to increase access to higher education for people from racial and ethnic minorities and redress longstanding injustices. Following the recent Supreme Court decision that “race conscious” admissions to universities and colleges are unconstitutional, many are concerned that medical schools may no longer prioritise their previous commitments to diversifying the US healthcare workforce.
Affirmative action policies have evolved from the early practice of setting quotas to reach enrolment goals for minority groups, to the more common current procedure of using race as one factor among others such as standardised test scores, grades, socioeconomic status, and extracurricular activities to inform decisions for acceptance to universities and medical schools. This helped provide the momentum needed to overcome longstanding barriers to higher education and professional careers for people from racial and ethnic minorities, such as underfunded elementary and secondary schools, unemployment, poorer housing, and increased stress from racism. Diversity matters in the physician …