In medical school, Emmanuel Asiedu was one of the very few students of color in a sea of white students. That did not change after graduation, when Asiedu became a doctor and found himself one of the few Black physicians working at his hospital.
No wonder. Statistics show that in 2019, only 5% of active physicians at U.S. hospitals were Black, despite Black people making up about 12% of the country’s population.
And Asiedu says this lack of diversity among doctors discourages young Black students from pursuing a medical degree.
“It’s difficult when you’re a person of color and the majority of your colleagues are not,” said Asiedu, who is chief medical resident at Rhode Island Hospital, The Miriam Hospital and Providence Veterans Administration Medical Center. “That’s one of the big challenges in medicine.”
Now Asiedu is part of a vanguard of physicians and other health care professionals and academics attempting to overcome that challenge.
Asiedu was among 40 health care leaders who participated in a youth summit in Providence in October designed to draw the interest of students from underrepresented communities and their parents in a future in medicine and public health. The event, hosted by the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University and Brown’s School of Public Health, was organized by Black Men in White Coats, a national organization that seeks to increase the number of Black men entering the field of medicine.
More than 200 people attended the Oct. 29 summit, ranging from third graders to people who have already earned an undergraduate degree.
“We thought this was a wonderful opportunity for people to be able to see themselves here and really show our [youths] that there can be representation of themselves in medicine,” said Rosedelma Seraphin, assistant director of diversity and multicultural affairs at the Alpert Medical School.
About 60 volunteers and 40 presenters, including local doctors, faculty, and medical and public health students, held panel discussions, workshops and hands-on activities, such as allowing elementary school students to put casts on the limbs of “injured” stuffed animals and allowing high schoolers to probe human organs in an animatronic torso.
For older students, there were sessions explaining how to apply to medical school and what steps to take to create a successful application.
“You really want to go to middle school, to third grade, to get students excited about the opportunities, to be able to come to a place like Brown and see a bunch of Black professionals that are doctors, that are health care professionals, that can speak to their journeys and their experiences,” said Jai-Me Potter-Rutledge, assistant dean of diversity, equity and inclusion at Brown’s School of Public Health.
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CASTING CALL:
Lisa Yang, left, a first-year medical student at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University, leads a youngster through the process of putting a cast on a teddy bear like it has a broken leg. The boy was attending a Black Men in White Coats youth summit at the school in October.
PBN PHOTO/
MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
The summit also helped students familiarize themselves with other programs at Brown University that help boost the pipeline to medicine.
“A lot of my educational background is because of programs like this one,” said Luckson Omoaregba, director of Pathway Programs at Alpert Medical School. Omoaregba, who was born in Nigeria but grew up in Pawtucket, took advantage of a college pathway program as a young student and saw how valuable this work is.
When in high school, Omoaregba participated in the Upward Bound program, which prepares students for college through advising, mentoring, tutoring and more.
This experience gave Omoaregba – who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Rhode Island – a “format” of how pathway programs can help students and led him to become the medical school’s first director of Pathway Programs a year ago.
Pathway Programs offer students from underrepresented communities – including Black, Latino, low-income and first-generation students – enrichment opportunities to prepare them for a career in health care.
For example, HealthCORE is a summer program targeting local high school students from underrepresented communities, led by medical students who organize panel discussions and talks exploring various career options in health care. Another program is the recently launched Meeting in the Middle, which connects students from Calcutt Middle School in Central Falls with mentors in medicine.
Omoaregba says he is working on developing a structured process to follow up with students and assess the long-term effects of these programs, but seeing former Pathway students pursue careers in health care is already showing him just how impactful the programs can be.
“I saw the impact I could have in higher education by providing access to students who looked like me,” Omoaregba said. “It became my way of bringing positive social change.”
The issue of diversity within health care is not a new one. Throughout the U.S., only 5% of active physicians identified as Black or African American in 2019, while 5.8% identified as Hispanic and 17.1% identified as Asian, according to a report by the Association of American Medical Colleges. This is a small improvement from 2014, when 4% of the physician workforce was made up of people identifying as Black or African American.
This lack of representation is apparent in medical schools too. In 2019, 8.4% of applicants to U.S. medical schools were Black or African American and 6.2% were Hispanic, Latino, or of Spanish origin. These percentages are lower for Black men. Data from the Association of American Medical Colleges shows that the number of Black male applicants and matriculants to medical school has been stagnant since the 1970s: in 1978, 1,410 black men applied to U.S. medical schools, while in 2014 that number was 1,337.
“The number is not only very low but it’s getting worse,” Potter-Rutledge said. “If it’s not something that you see, it’s not something that you can imagine doing yourself, then you’re not really seeking that out.”
Asiedu is not surprised by these numbers. As a Black man from Ghana, he knows how challenging it can be for people of color and people from outside of the United States to pursue careers in medicine. After moving to Lincoln with his family when he was a child, Asiedu attended public schools. When he was young, he didn’t think about a future in a physician’s coat, even though his father is a doctor.
For him, it was a personal tragedy that set him on the path of medicine. His sister fell sick and died when Asiedu was 17, sparking in him the desire to help others.
After completing an undergraduate degree at Rhode Island College, Asiedu was selected for the early identification program, a cooperative program between the Alpert Medical School of Brown University and URI, RIC and Providence College that provides selected students early provisional admission to the medical school following graduation. Asiedu went on to complete his residency in internal medicine through Brown University, at Rhode Island Hospital, Miriam and the VA medical center, where he now is chief resident.
Asiedu’s father mentored him throughout the challenging journey, but Asiedu knows others are not as lucky.
“If you’re not seeing a lot of people who look like you in that field, you’re probably less likely to want to pursue a career because you have that general sense it’s not for people who are similar to you,” Asiedu said.
And this is only part of the equation. On top of a lack of representation, there are centuries of historical challenges, including social and economic disparities, that place barriers between young students of color and higher education. But this is why summits such as the one organized by Black Men in White Coats are so important, Seraphin says.
“It’s a multitude of different issues, compounded with the racism and bias that Black men experience in our country, as well as economics and access to different resources,” she said. “Which is why it’s really important to make a pathway and have summits like this and raise awareness.”
