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Women, minorities still underrepresented in medical specialties

Too few women and minorities are entering certain medical specialties in the U.S., researchers say.

Diversifying the physician workforce may be key to addressing health disparities and inequities, Dr. Curtiland Deville of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who worked on the study, said in an email.

“Minority physicians continue to provide the majority of care for underserved and non-English speaking populations,” Dr. Deville added.

Yet “in no specialties . . . were the percentages of black or Hispanic trainees comparable with the representation of these groups in the US population,” he and his colleagues wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Medical schools have been trying to increase the diversity of their students, “with perhaps the assumption that this increased diversity will translate downstream to all specialties,” Dr. Deville told Reuters Health.

But, he added, his team’s new study shows that in some specialties, such as radiology, orthopedics, and otolaryngology, there’s still “disproportionate underrepresentation of women and minorities.”

Using publicly reported data, the researchers determined that of the 16,835 medical school graduates in 2012, 48 percent were women and 15 percent were minority groups (including 7 percent Hispanic and 7 percent black).

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