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Social Mission Alliance April Newsletter

This month, we invited our Diversity Initiative’s lead researcher, Edward Salsberg to be our guest editor. Please enjoy this month’s content focused on diversity in the health workforce.

The Health Workforce Diversity Initiative is an important part of the Social Mission Alliance. The Initiative uses data to assess the extent to which the diversity of healthcare professionals reflects the diversity of the population by health profession at the national and state level. This includes diversity of graduates of health professions education programs and diversity in the existing health workforce.

The goal of the Diversity Initiative is to provide data to inform health professions education programs, health professions associations, policy makers, students, health care organizations, states and advocates, as well as the community at large. Additionally, we hope to promote transparency and accountability and efforts to increase health workforce diversity.

In this newsletter, we focus on some of the products of the Diversity Initiative and how to access the data on health workforce diversity.

– Ed Salsberg, MPA

(Diversity Initiative Research Lead)

Diversity Tracker 2.0

The Health Workforce Diversity Initiative uses data to assess the the diversity of healthcare professionals in relation to the diversity of the population by health profession at the national, state, and local level.

A central work product of this initiative is the Health Workforce Diversity Tracker, an interactive tool showing the diversity of our current health workforce and graduates among more than 10 health professions at 3,600 health professions education programs.

A new version of our diversity tracker will be released soon, with multiple new and exciting updates, including:

Double the number of health professions covered
Updated data from 2019-2021 to represent the workforce pipeline, and 2017-2021 data for the current workforce.
The addition of Asian-American and American Indian/Alaska Native populations

We are happy to work with organizations and researchers on accessing this data. If you are interested, please contact esalsberg@gwu.edu.

Workforce Diversity Initiative Update:

4 New Grants to Study Health Workforce Diversity

Incorporating Equity into Health Care Grantmaking and Funding Processes: With support from the California Health Care Foundation, we are working with the California Health Care Access and Information agency (HCAI) to explore how the health workforce grantmaking/funding process could be used to promote equity, a more diverse workforce and service to high need populations.

Improving the Data on Diversity and Supporting the Social Mission of Health Professions Education: With support from the California Endowment, the Diversity Initiative is doing an extensive review of potential sources of data of value to those researching or advocating for a workforce reflective of the population. The Initiative is also exploring the development of a network of individuals and organizations in California supportive of the social mission of health professions education.

Evaluation of the California Medicine Scholars Program (CMSP): This creative program identifies individuals attending community colleges in CA with an intention of becoming a health professional; the program will then provide guidance and assistance for to the individuals to complete their bachelor’s degree, gain admission and successful complete medical school or another health profession education program. The Diversity Initiative received funding to support a 3-year evaluation of the program.

Comparing Diversity of Community Health Center Staff to the Population Served: Working with the National Association of Community Health Centers, we have designed a data collection instrument and diversity index to provide feedback to Centers comparing the diversity of their staff by professional category to the diversity of the patient population. The data report to each center will include benchmarks for diversity by category of worker.

Did you know that 35.2% of Louisiana's college-age population is Black, but Black students only make up of 4.5% of med grads, and 4.9% of dental grads? Read the full report on Louisiana from the SMA website.

Diversity Data

Be sure to follow the Social Mission Alliance on Twitter (@SocialMissionEd) as we release weekly “workforce data bites,” focused on different areas of our health workforce data.

The goal with these “data bites” is to make our research about the lack of diversity in the healthcare workforce more salient, understandable, and approachable.

Articles and Reports of Interest

Learn about the diversity of the health workforce in Louisiana: The Race and Ethnicity of the Louisiana Health Workforce
This National Journal article discusses the importance and use of pipeline programs as a method to increase diversity in health professions: Lack of diversity among the medical ranks often means inferior care in communities of color
Importance of increasing physician diversity and impacts on patients: Increasing Representation of Black Primary Care Physicians.
Race Conscious Affirmative Action: What’s Next considers implications of the upcoming SCOTUS decision on affirmative action, and how colleges will likely struggle to enroll a diverse student body.
A Viewpoint published in JAMA discusses how The Supreme Court is Harming Public Health and the Environment
The Social Mission Alliance’s team member Candice Chen was featured in this 9 minute podcast episode from NPR podcast on Match season, called What’s the Cure for America’s Doctor Shortage?
- Want to learn more from Candice? She also published a piece in MedPage Today, A Policy Guide to Fixing the Doctor Shortage

Ally Spotlight

This month, we spoke to the Center for Healthcare Diversity at the UC Davis School of Medicine about their work, findings, and goals.

“We hope that our work informs (and, if needed, disrupts) policies aimed at improving access to education, including higher ed, and dismantling unequal barriers to careers in health and medicine.”

Read the full interview

Participate in research:

Are you currently a medical school faculty member? Share your experiences with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion-related activities in this 15 min survey study evaluating support for DEI service tasks in academic medicine at allopathic medical schools. Access the survey

Announcements

The Social Mission Alliance Releases Advocacy Priorities

The SMA Advocacy Advisory Council recently hosted a virtual summit to convene leaders and activists in pursuit of health equity.

Input from the Advocacy Advisory Council culminated in the Social Mission Alliance’s newly released advocacy priorities, which are:

Ensuring that the diversity of the health workforce matches the health workforce of the nation, and
Transforming social mission education to make sure that all health professions trainees are prepared to treat all the diverse communities of the country.