TUESDAY, Feb. 4, 2025 (HealthDay News) — U.S. internal medicine (IM) residents from ethnicities and races underrepresented in medicine (URIM) remain underrepresented compared with their program’s county population, according to a study published online Jan. 30 in JAMA Network Open.
Jung G. Kim, Ph.D., M.P.H., from New York University Langone Health in New York City, and colleagues explored county-level racial and ethnic representation of U.S. IM residents and examined racial and ethnic concordance between residents and their communities in a retrospective cross-sectional study. The analysis included data from 4,848 IM residents (15.7 percent classified as URIM) training across 205 counties.
The researchers found that among URIM groups, American Indian and Alaska Native (mean representation quotients [RQ], 0.00), Black (mean RQ, 0.09), Hispanic and Latinx (mean RQ, 0.00), and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander (mean RQ, 0.00) residents were grossly underrepresented versus their training sites’ county-level representation. One quarter of counties (24.8 percent) with IM programs had no URIM residents. In counties with more minority-serving institutions, Black and Hispanic or Latinx residents had higher representation (mean RQ, 0.19). In counties with more academic health centers, Hispanic or Latinx residents were less represented (mean RQ, 0.00). In counties with more minority-serving institutions, Asian residents had lower RQs (mean RQ, 6.00). White residents had higher representation in counties with greater presence of academic health centers (mean RQ, 0.77).
“These findings should inform racial and ethnic diversity policies to address the continuing underrepresentation among graduate medical education physicians, which adversely impacts the care of historically underserved communities,” the authors write.
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