Minority Health Month Message: Improve Diversity of Physician Workforce

Academy members can help close the health disparities gap affecting minority populations and raise awareness of family medicine as a career by encouraging young people in the minority community to become family physicians. That's AAFP's message for National Minority Health Month, which begins April 1.

The Academy has published several online resources that can help members encourage high school and college undergraduate students to consider family medicine as a career. The effort is part of a long-term strategy to decrease the health disparities gap between racial, cultural and ethnic minority groups and non-minority groups by increasing diversity in the physician workforce.

Numerous publications, including the Institute of Medicine's 2002 report, Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, discuss the link between poor health outcomes for minorities and the shortage of minority health care professionals. Those disparities could be ameliorated by increasing the number of physicians from minority communities, according to an executive summary (PDF file: 15 pages / 127 KB. More about PDFs.) of the Sullivan Commission's 2004 report, Missing Persons: Minorities in the Health Professions.

True, said Linda Siy, M.D., of Fort Worth, Texas, former chair of the AAFP Committee on Special Constituencies, which last year developed the Academy's theme for the 2006 National Minority Health Month.

"Studies into health care disparities have shown that health care improves for people from ethnic and racial minorities when health care providers come from the same background," Siy said. "Increasing the number of health care professionals from underrepresented backgrounds will decrease the health care disparities we're seeing now in minority populations."

Audrey Boyd, M.D., of Columbia, S.C., chair of the AAFP Commission on Health of the Public, will represent the AAFP at the Annual Leadership Summit on Health Disparities in Washington on April 11-12. The summit, jointly convened by the National Minority Health Month Foundation and AMA, will feature sessions on workforce diversity, management of disparities among patients with kidney disease, racial and ethnic disparities among those being treated for heart disease, and physician quality improvement as a strategy for better care for all populations.