Geospatial Analysis of the Proportion of Persons Defined as Underrepresented in Medicine for Each Medical School and Their Surrounding Core-Based Statistical Area

Zoel A Quiñónez; Angel Benitez-Melo; Laura M Diaz; Michael Lennig; Danton Char; Charlotte Smith

doi:10.1089/heq.2023.0221

Geospatial Analysis of the Proportion of Persons Defined as Underrepresented in Medicine for Each Medical School and Their Surrounding Core-Based Statistical Area

Health Equity. 2024 Feb 28;8(1):132-137. doi: 10.1089/heq.2023.0221. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Zoel A Quiñónez^{1

2}, Angel Benitez-Melo³, Laura M Diaz⁴, Michael Lennig¹, Danton Char¹, Charlotte Smith⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, USA.
² Graduate Division, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA.
³ Department of Biology, University of San Diego, San Diego, California, USA.
⁴ Division of Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA.

Abstract

Background: The current approach to increasing diversity in medical education fails to consider local community demographics when determining medical school matriculation.

Purpose: We propose that medical schools better reflect their surrounding community, both because racially/ethnically concordant physicians have been shown to provide better care and to repair the historical and current racist impacts of these institutions that have criminalized, displaced, and excluded local Black and Brown communities.

Methods and results: In this study, we used geospatial analysis to determine that medical school enrollments generally fail to reflect their surrounding community, represented as their core-based statistical area, within which the individual medical schools reside.

Keywords: antiracism; diversity; geospatial analysis; health equity; medical education.