These Doctors Are Trying To Get More People Of Color To Join Their Ranks. What Some Have Overcome Is

To many in the medical profession, it’s a public health crisis in the making: While African-Americans make up 12 percent of the U.S. population, only about 6 percent of doctors are black. And evidence shows that patients feel better about the quality of their health care when their doctors look like them.

To address this workforce issue, a group of young doctors, dentists, and other health care professionals started a traveling program called Tour for Diversity that goes all over the U.S. to meet with young people of color who are interested in health career paths. STAT talked to some of the leaders of Tour for Diversity at a recent stop in Winston-Salem, N.C., about some of the challenges they have faced in achieving their goals of becoming doctors and dentists.

Here’s what they had to say.

Dr. Italo Brown, an emergency medicine resident physician from New York City, recounts his experience treating a young, African-American man with gunshot wounds in the emergency room.

His video on using ethnicity as a strength:

https://www.statnews.com/2018/02/07/black-doctors-racism-medicine/