Houston med students help Black teens see future as doctors

Out of roughly 180.

That was double the number he typically heard during interviews at other schools. His excitement, he knew, spoke to the remarkably enduring history of racism and underrepresentation in medicine. A 2021 UCLA study found that the share of Black physicians in the U.S. has increased by only 4 percentage points over the past 120 years — from 1.3 percent in 1900 to 5.4 percent in 2018 — and that the percentage of doctors who are Black men remains unchanged since 1940.

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Batiste wasted little time joining the ranks of young physicians and medical students in Houston who have sought to address the complexities behind those statistics. 

In 2021, he co-founded the Baylor College of Medicine chapter of Black Men in White Coats, a national organization focused on increasing the number of Black men in the field through education and mentorship. Over the last two years, the Houston group has grown from 11 to 18 members.

“I felt like I was given an opportunity,” said Batiste, formerly a middle school science teacher in Florida. “When I used to teach, I saw a lot of students who were more than capable of becoming physicians and going all the way. But sometimes people are a product of circumstance. And if you’ve never really had anyone around you to help you break that barrier, it’s really hard to step out and do that.” 

History of racism

Batiste is not simply concerned about job opportunities. For Black patients, seeing a doctor that looks like them can improve their health, studies show. 

A 2018 Stanford University analysis of 1,300 Black men in Oakland found they were more likely to talk with Black doctors, compared to white physicians, about health problems and seek more invasive screenings. The patients assigned to Black doctors increased their uptake of diabetes and cholesterol screenings by 20 percent and 26 percent, respectively. Overall, the authors concluded that Black doctors could help reduce the white-Black disparity in heart-related deaths by 19 percent.

The lack of Black representation in medicine often is traced back to the Flexner Report of 1910, which played a key role in shaping the modern medical education system in North America. The report, written by educator Abraham Flexner, called for greater science education for physicians and more rigorous standards for medical education in universities.  

Flexner justified the need for medical education for Black people, in part, as a means to protect white people from contagious diseases once thought to be widespread in the Black population, according to an analysis in the Journal of the National Medical Association. He specified that their training should focus on hygiene for Black people rather than surgery.

After the report, about 75 percent of U.S. medical schools closed, including five of the seven historically Black universities that were training physicians at the time. With persistent segregation and racism, education opportunities for aspiring Black physicians never fully recovered, experts say. 

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Today, most Black doctors in the U.S. have graduated from a limited number of HBCUs with relatively small class sizes, said Dr. Kenya Steele, assistant dean of diversity and outreach at the University of Houston College of Medicine.

Even as more medical schools adopt “holistic” admission criteria that weigh unique accolades and life experiences, in addition to test scores and GPAs, “the approach still has room for more widespread usage,” Steele said. 

There are a variety of other interconnected reasons why Black physicians continue to account for such a small percentage of doctors compared to their share of the population, including fewer quality educational opportunities, high poverty rates and the exorbitant cost of medical education, Steele added.

Another major factor, she said, is a lack of mentorship. 

Opening eyes

None of Batiste’s family members had been to college. He grew up a military brat, his mother serving in the U.S. Navy. His parents, who were born in Panama, traveled from Iceland to Italy to the United States.

He did not see his first Black male physician until college, but he held onto a desire to become a doctor from a young age, after hearing about his grandmother struggling with access to medical care in Panama. He navigated educational opportunities largely on his own. In high school, he joined an International Baccalaureate program to better prepare him for college and shadowed his high school basketball team’s physician, a prominent local surgeon. 

The history of Black marginalization in his desired field came into sharper focus when he was an undergraduate in Florida. Batiste remembers learning a sobering statistic from the American Association of Medical Colleges: fewer Black men had applied to medical school in 2014 than in 1978. Later, as a teacher, he witnessed how mentorship programs in STEM could inspire his students. 

He jumped at the chance to start a similar initiative at Baylor College of Medicine.

Black Men in White Coats now collaborates with organizations like Mission Transformation, which provides STEM training for young people of color, ages 9 to 15, and ensures each student receives regular one-on-one mentorship. Baylor medical students match with one or two mentees and meet with them at least once a month to talk about topics ranging from health care, higher education and professional development to personal growth. 

Batiste connected with his high school-age mentee through a family member. The teenager wants to be a physician, and Batiste is preparing him for college with sound advice: make sure you are in good standing in your science classes; be well-rounded with extracurricular activities; stay up on the scores you need to earn certain scholarships.

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Importantly, Batiste emphasizes having fun.

“You have to find a way to find enjoyment every step of the way,” he said. “Otherwise, you’re going to burn out. So, right now, while you’re in high school, trying to take all these courses and do all these things, find something that you’re passionate about in general so you’re not just doing it to help the resume.”

The partnership between Black Men in White Coats and Mission Transformation encouraged another mentee, 14-year-old Damon Morris Jr., to break out of his shy personality and talk about his interests and build social skills, said his mother, Osjetta Gascey. He is a tall boy, she said, so most people assume he gravitates to sports. While he does play basketball, he also is drawn to art, chess and Lego building, she said. 

He has met many kids like him at Mission Transformation events, including a class that taught computer coding. His Black Men in White Coats mentor, Ronald Goldsberry, has been a steady presence in his life, explaining the different specialties in medicine and sometimes attending his basketball games. 

“At school, they hear a lot about different careers, but being able to talk to people who look like him and talk to people who are successful … has just opened up his eyes,” Gascey said. 

A long way to go

Mentorship programs for medical careers are not new, but funding, personnel to run them and “and institutions seeing value” in them often are reasons the programs close or never come to fruition, said Steele. 

Students like Batiste and Dr. Sandra Coker, an emergency medicine physician at the University of Chicago, take it upon themselves to make it work.

Coker, a Houston native, launched Black Girl White Coat — unrelated to Black Men in White Coats — in 2016, when she attended McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. The organization started with a modest following on YouTube and Instagram. Coker said she gave out scholarships with money from her own pocket — “money I didn’t have” — to help other students pay for medical school. Then, she looked around at her white peers and realized they all had moms, dads, aunts or uncles in the medical field who could guide them through the process.

She introduced a mentorship component to her organization, which has grown into a nonprofit with international reach. Black Girl White Coat has paired mentors with roughly 800 young people of color, attending schools as far away as Nigeria, Coker said. The organization also offers mentors for older students looking to enter into residency and fellowship programs. 

“To be frank, there’s still a lot of racism rooted in the way applications are reviewed at the (graduate level),” Coker said. “A lot of programs have noticed this problem. They have been called out, and they have responded by trying to make their review process more holistic. But do we have a long way to go? Absolutely.” 

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The racial unrest in America in recent years, sparked by killings of unarmed Black people at the hands of police, has underscored the importance of holistic review beyond “checking boxes,” she said. The pandemic also highlighted persistent racial inequities in health care.

There have been small signs of progress. Of the roughly 22,000 students who started medical school in the fall of 2021, those who identified as Black or African American rose by 21 percent from the previous year, according to the  Association of American Medical Colleges. Earlier this year, Tamia Potter became the first Black woman to enter Vanderbilt University’s neurosurgery residency program.

Additionally, in 2021, Baylor College of Medicine partnered with Xavier University, a historically Black college in New Orleans, to create a Medical Track Program that helps undergraduates earn “assured acceptance” to the medical school.

Coker and Black Men in White Coats want to build on the momentum. Goldsberry, a second-year medical student and co-founder of the Baylor group, hopes Black Men in White Coats can sustain itself and incorporate students at other Houston institutions. Maintaining the organization is an important way to ensure accountability when it comes to representation in the student body, he said.

He and Batiste know broader change takes time, but they do not plan to stop pushing for it anytime soon.

“Once we leave Baylor, I think we’ll have it in us to increase diversity wherever we go,” Goldsberry said.  

julian.gill@houstonchronicle.com