Category: Administration
Keywords: Workforce, Diversity, Under-represented minorities (PubMed Search)
Posted: 9/27/2023 by Mercedes Torres, MD
(Updated: 11/22/2024)
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Physician Workforce Diversity in EM
Health inequities along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines are a brutal reality of the current state of health care in the US. One way to attempt to address these inequities is to make a concerted effort to diversify our physician workforce. As authors have noted, “Having physicians from diverse backgrounds as colleagues and role models can promote understanding and tolerance in nonminority physicians, ultimately improving medical care for patients who are part of these racial and ethnic groups. Increasing the population of underrepresented minority (URM) physicians in the workforce also directly improves health care for medically underserved populations from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, as studies have shown that physicians from URM backgrounds are more likely to work with these patients.”
Administrators are often tasked with the difficult job of creating a cohesive group of emergency physicians to meet the needs of the community they serve. Strategies to diversify that workforce would benefit from a multi-level approach, including the following:
Small steps can create big changes.
