During the American Medical Association (AMA) House of Delegates meeting, the AMA adopted policy aimed at improving the diversity of the physician workforce. The policy’s report outlined practices and interventions that can increase racial, ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic diversity among the physician workforce, including targeted recruitment and revised medical school admissions policies, curriculum changes, summer enrichment programs, and comprehensive programs that integrate multiple interventions, such as financial, academic, and social support.

Read the AMA’s Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity.

The report also identified institutional and structural factors that interfere with or create attrition on the path to becoming a physician and discusses recommendations to minimize these interferences. Additionally, the report examined the harmful past actions that the medical profession as a whole and organized medicine have perpetrated on communities of color, particularly the role that the Flexner Report of 1910 played in the closure of the majority of Black medical schools at the time and in severely limiting the number of Black physicians.

The new policy calls on the AMA to:

• Recognize some people have been historically underrepresented, excluded from, and marginalized in medical education and medicine because of their race, ethnicity, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic origin, and rurality, due to racism and other systems of exclusion and discrimination.
• Commit to promoting truth and reconciliation in medical education as it relates to improving equity.
• Recognize the harm caused by the Flexner Report to historically Black medical school the diversity of the physician workforce, and the outcomes of minoritized and marginalized patient populations.
• Work with appropriate stakeholders to commission and enact the recommendations of forward-looking, cross-continuum, external study of 21st century medical education focused on reimagining the future of health equity and racial justice in medical education improving the diversity of the health workforce, and ameliorating inequitable outcomes among minoritized and marginalized patient populations.
• Encourage the development of evidence-informed programs to build role models among academic leadership and faculty for the mentorship of students, residents, and fellows underrepresented in medicine and in specific specialties.
• Encourage physicians to engage in their communities to guide, support, and mentor high school and undergraduate students with a calling to medicine.
• Encourage medical schools, health care institutions, managed care and other appropriate groups to adopt and utilize activities that bolster efforts to include and support individuals who are underrepresented in medicine by developing policies that articulate the value and importance of diversity as a goal that benefits all participants.
• Continue to study and provide recommendations to improve the future of health equity and racial justice in medical education, the diversity of the health workforce, and the outcomes of marginalized patient populations.
• Encourage the U.S. Department of Education and Department of Labor to develop policies and initiatives in support of students from marginalized backgrounds.
• Advocate for funding to support the creation and sustainability of Historically Black College and University, Hispanic-Serving Institution, and Tribal College and University affiliated medical schools and residency programs, with the goal of achieving a physician workforce that is proportional to the racial, ethnic, and gender composition of the United States population.
• Work with appropriate stakeholders to study reforms to mitigate demographic and socioeconomic inequities in the residency and fellowship selection process, including but not limited to the selection and reporting of honor society membership and the use of standardized tools to rank applicants, with report back to the House of Delegates.
• Establish a task force to guide organizational transformation within and beyond the AMA toward restorative justice to promote truth, reconciliation, and healing in medicine and medical education.