CNU professors receive grant to help increase diversity in medical schools, starting at the undergrad level – Daily Press

Newport News — Two Christopher Newport University professors received a grant from Sentara Healthcare this month that will allow them to support students from underrepresented communities who want to attend medical or dental school.

The one-year grant of about $95,000 will help students enrolled in pre-health programs pay for books, test-preparation courses, entrance exams and application fees. The money also will go toward $5,000 tuition scholarships for nine students, as well as cover costs for some to attend the Student National Medical Association’s annual conference in the spring.

Gwynne Brown, a professor and director of pre-health programs at CNU, said she and professor Kathryn Cole are grateful for the grant, which will allow them to help students overcome some of the barriers to entering medical school.

“We really do need to increase the underserved representation in health care for multiple reasons,” she said.

Brown said those underrepresented include minorities and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds as well as students from rural areas.

“Right now it’s tough to get physicians in rural areas,” Brown said. It’s well documented, she added, that medical students who come from rural areas are more likely to return to work there.

CNU officials said easing the financial burden can also allow some students to work fewer hours while attending school and put them on a more even playing field with students who do not face similar worries.

Dana Beckton, the chief diversity officer at Sentara, said the grant is part of Project Choice, a project falling under the Sentara Cares Healthy Communities 2.0 umbrella. Sentara Cares is the hospital’s social responsibility program working to improve health equity in the communities it serves.

Beckton said Project Choice is about making students from underrepresented communities aware of opportunities in the medical field.

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“Research and statistics have shown physicians of color, specifically Black African American and Hispanic physicians, are drastically underrepresented in medicine,” Beckton said.

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, in 2018, only 5% of all active physicians nationwide identified as Black, and 5.8% identified as Hispanic. This compares with 56.2% who identified as white.

Also according to the AAMC, about 25,600 applicants to U.S. medical schools in 2021-22 identified as “white only” compared with about 6,200 and 4,000 who identified as Black only or Hispanic only, respectively. About 13,400 identified as Asian only.

“So the purpose of the CNU grant, as well as some other grants that we will be doing with other academic institutions, really seeks to eliminate some of the barriers for those students to go into medicine,” Beckton said. “At the pre-med level, there’s a recognition that there are all types of exposures and experiences that they need, as well as some just fundamental financial barriers that exist.”

“People can have the aptitude, but if there’s not opportunity, if there’s barriers in the way, it creates the disparities in the numbers that we see in terms of representation in medicine,” Beckton said.

Nour Habib, nour.habib@virginiamedia.com