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There is an acute shortage of Black doctors throughout America, and the negative impact this has on African-American health care will continue to increase unless this changes, according to the American Association of Medical Colleges.
Affinia Healthcare has received a $500,000 grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) for a Health Center Planning and Development Program.
Affinia Healthcare is implementing a Family Medicine residency program in partnership with A.T. Still University, Christian Hospital and DePaul Hospital. The planning and implementation will focus on diversity and equity in training future primary care physicians for service at Affinia Healthcare and in the community health center environment.
“Affinia Healthcare is honored to have been selected for this award as it supports our strategic initiatives to help increase diversity and equity in the delivery of care for patients in a practical and relevant way,” said Dr. Kendra Holmes, Affinia Healthcare president and CEO.
“We are excited to collaborate with ATSU, Christian Hospital, and DePaul Hospital — leaders in the education and healthcare industries — to make this significant shift in how the next generation of healthcare professionals will serve our communities.”
Affinia Healthcare will seek certification by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and lead the residency program which will start during the 2025-26 academic year.
Only about 5.7% of physicians in the United States identify as Black or African American, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. The U.S. African American population is about 12%, according to the 2020 Census.
Michael Dill, the Association of American Medical Colleges’ director of workforce studies, told CNN that Black people being “historically excluded from medicine” and “institutional and systemic racism in our society,” our reasons there are so few Black doctors.
At young ages, exposure to the sciences, science education resources, mentors and role models all make it more likely that a child could become a doctor – but such exposures and resources sometimes are disproportionately not as accessible in the Black community.
“We can improve our admissions to medical school, make them more holistic, try to remove bias from that, but that’s still not going to solve the problem,” Dill said.
2.8% of physicians were Black in 1940, and 9.7% of the US population was Black. That increased to 5.4% in 2018, but 12.8% of the population was Black.
According to the AAMC, the number of Black or African American first-year medical school students increased 21% between the academic years of 2020 and 2021.
Affinia Healthcare will now help grow those numbers through the $500,000 grant.
“Statistics show that many patients in underserved communities suffer or experience a lower standard of care when seeing providers who don’t understand or have bias toward certain populations,” said Dr. Melissa Tepe, Affinia Healthcare chief medical officer.
“It is imperative that we cultivate a new generation of clinicians who will know how to serve these populations in a more equitable way. This is another way Affinia Healthcare can help provide a better quality of care for our patients and communities.”
Having Black physicians care for Black patients could shrink the difference in cardiovascular deaths among White versus Black patients by 19%, according to a paper written by Dr. Marcella Alsan, an infectious disease physician and professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School.
Alsan authored the paper with colleagues Dr. Owen Garrick and Grant Graziani while she was attending Stanford. It was published in 2019 in the American Economic Review.
As reported by CNN, during the fall and winter of 2017 and 2018 in Oakland, California, 637 Black men were randomly assigned to visit either a Black or a non-Black male doctor. The visits included discussions and evaluations of blood pressure, body mass index, cholesterol levels and diabetes, as well as flu vaccinations.
“We saw a dramatic increase in their likelihood of getting preventive care when they engage with Black physicians,” said Garrick, chief medical officer of CVS Health’s clinical trial services.
“It didn’t look like there was a strong preference for Black doctors versus non-Black doctors. It was only when people actually had a chance to communicate with their physicians, talk about ‘Why should I be getting these preventative care services?’” Alsan said.
In addition, when Black patients receive care from Black doctors, those visits tend to be longer and have higher ratings of patients feeling satisfied, according to a separate study of more than 200 adults seeing 31 physicians, study published in 2003 in the Journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
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