Mississippi faces shortage of black doctors, even as lawmakers increasingly crack down on diversity programs

Jerrian Reedy was 9 when his father was admitted to a hospital in Hattiesburg, about two hours northeast of New Orleans, with three gunshot wounds. Reedy recalled visiting his father within the intensive care unit that summer in 2009, even though children weren’t normally allowed in that part of the hospital.

“Just seeing him lying in bed, in a hospital bed, was traumatic for me, to say the least,” Reedy said.

His father died per week after his admission, in the center of a nine-month period by which Reedy also lost his aunt and grandmother. “They say death comes in threes,” he said.

This chain of events led him to pursue a medical profession that might help him protect other children from losing family members too early.

Fifteen years later, Reedy has accomplished his first 12 months on the University of Mississippi School of Medicine, a remarkable accomplishment, and never simply because his profession path was born of grief and trauma. Reedy is one of a small group of black medical students in a state where nearly 4 in 10 — but just one in 10 doctors — discover as black or African American. Of the 660 medical students enrolled in the identical four-year program as Reedy, 82 students, or about 12%, are black.

Medical schools across the country are scrambling to recruit Black, Latino and Native American students, who’re still disproportionately underrepresented within the medical field. Studies have shown that patients of color prefer to see doctors of their race — and a few studies have shown that health outcomes are higher for Black patients who see Black doctors.

But a recent surge in opposition from Republicans threatens to undermine those efforts, school administrators say, and will deepen the deep disparities in health care access already experienced by people of color.

From 2023 – the 12 months by which Supreme Court votes to ban positive discrimination In higher education, greater than two dozen states, including Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas, have introduced or passed laws geared toward restricting or banning diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs.

“I don’t expect this movement of anti-DEI legislation to slow down or stop at all,” said Anton Gunn, a health care consultant and former head of the Office of External Affairs on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “And it will likely intensify if Donald Trump is given the chance to become president of the United States again.”

Diversity programs meet resistance

In 2023, Florida and Texas became the primary states to pass laws banning DEI activities in higher education. Several other states, including Idaho, North Carolina and Wyoming, passed laws targeting such programs this 12 months.

In Mississippi, state Rep. Becky Currie and state Sen. Angela Burks Hill, each Republicans, introduced separate bills that may restrict how colleges and universities can spend money on DEI initiatives. Both bills have stalled in legislative committees and haven’t been dropped at the 2024 Legislature for a vote.

In a press release, Hill said Mississippi needs more doctors of all specialties, not only Black ones, and that she believes money spent on salaries and DEI programs should go toward initiatives that profit all students.

“Qualifications should determine who gets into medical school, not race or socioeconomic status,” she said. “Can’t we just be happy with more highly qualified doctors, regardless of race? I thought the goal was a race-blind society.”

The movement to ban DEI programs enjoys broad support from conservatives across the country.

Jay Greene, a senior fellow on the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, said he believes diversity programs “fail for hundreds of reasons.” he cited research he had conducted with a conservative public health group called Do No Harm, which rejects the idea that access to black doctors improves outcomes for black patients.

“That’s not to say there aren’t potential benefits to greater diversity in the medical profession,” Greene said. For example, more black doctors could encourage more black kids to contemplate careers in health care, he said. “But that benefit doesn’t apply to health outcomes.”

Meanwhile, school administrators are closely monitoring progress on such regulations.

In March, the University of Florida all DEI programs have been eliminated and fired employees related to those efforts. In Alabama, lawmakers and faculty leaders are grappling with a law signed that very same month by Republican Gov. Kay Ivey that may ban DEI programs in public schools, state agencies and universities starting Oct. 1.

“We have to be very, very careful,” said Richard deShazo, who teaches on the Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine on the University of Alabama at Birmingham and was chairman of a committee that raised money for black medical students.

“You can’t raise money for black kids. You have to raise money for medical students,” he said.

Bitter history

The shortage of black doctors is just not unique to Mississippi. The same story may very well be told in lots of other places, especially within the South, where greater than half of all black Americans live and where health outcomes consistently rank among the many worst in United States.

But if we have a look at Mississippi, one of the unhealthiest states within the country, we see how the roots of systemic racism proceed to shape the nation’s health care workforce.

“A lot of black doctors in the state have a bad taste in their mouths about our medical school,” said Demondes Haynes, associate dean for medical school admissions on the University of Mississippi Medical Center, where he graduated in 1999 as one of 4 black students in his class.

Mississippi is home to an estimated 1.1 million black people, but has fewer than 600 black doctors. Research suggests health outcomes would improve if there have been more of them. One study was published last 12 months within the medical journal JAMA Network Open It was found that life expectancy was longer amongst black patients in counties where a better percentage of primary care physicians are black.

In a 2018 study of greater than 1,300 black men in Oakland, California, those assigned to a black doctor were more more likely to comply with screening for diabetes, cholesterol and other health problems, in response to findings published in 2018 by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“We’re absolutely not saying every black patient has to have a black doctor,” Haynes said. But because Mississippi’s patient population is diverse, “they should at least have the right to say, ‘This is what I want,’” he added.

But most black patients don’t have that alternative. Nearly two dozen of Mississippi’s 82 counties haven’t any black doctors, while 4 counties say they haven’t any doctors in any respect, in response to Medical Staff Report published by the state in 2019

For greater than a century, from its founding within the mid-Nineteenth century, the University of Mississippi had not admitted black students—and that policy prolonged to its medical school. In 1972, nearly a decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial segregation in higher education, the primary black doctor to graduate from Jackson Medical School. Even then, only a few black students were accepted into medical school every year.

Before the federal government banned schools from rejecting black applicants because of race, prospective black doctors who applied were directed to historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, such as Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Haynes said.

Many older black doctors in Mississippi still remember getting rejection letters, he said, pointing to composite photographs of graduating doctors that adorn the partitions of the medical school constructing in Jackson. Many of the earliest composites, dating from the Fifties, show classes of all-white and almost all-male students.

“The history of Mississippi—everyone remembers it,” Haynes said. “And those who have experienced it have a hard time with it.”

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“Shaping Possibilities”

On a damp Saturday morning in mid-April, 17-year-old Dorothy Gray, a highschool sophomore, walked to a hospital bed at Jackson Medical School to intubate a simulated patient within the simulation lab.

Gray was one of greater than 100 highschool and college students who participated within the annual African American Visiting Day on the University of Mississippi Medical School, established greater than a decade ago to generate interest amongst prospective black students. Administrators, who also organize special visiting days for Latino and Native American students, said anyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, is welcome to participate. They acknowledge that the majority participants won’t turn into doctors, and their goal is just not to provide preferential treatment to minority applicants.

“It’s about shaping the possibilities of what could be,” said Loretta Jackson-Williams, associate dean for medical education. “These kids are on the edge of choosing something that’s really hard for their future, or choosing an easier path. That choice doesn’t happen overnight.”

In addition to African American Visiting Day, Mississippi medical school officials also offer a test prep program for applicants from underrepresented backgrounds who weren’t accepted to medical school.

The school recently identified 16 applicants, 12 of whom were black, who weren’t accepted to medical school within the last admissions cycle because their MCAT scores were too low. This 12 months, those applicants will receive a test-prep course developed by The Princeton Review — free of charge — and can have the chance to satisfy with administrators to learn strengthen their medical school applications.

“So many students have never heard someone say, ‘You can do this. I believe you can do this,'” said Dan Coleman, the medical school’s director of outreach.

For Jerrian Reedy, who desires to be an orthopedic surgeon, the road to medical school took years. He took advantage of the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s PROMISE program — short for Promoting Recruitment Opportunities in Medicine with Individual Study Experiences — which offers admission to underprivileged students who meet certain qualifications, including a 3.0 grade point average in undergraduate science classes.

During his second 12 months of undergraduate studies, Reedy saw a chance to learn more about medical school when Haynes, the associate dean, visited the Ole Miss campus in Oxford to interview students.

“I saw a few spots open, I put my name down,” he said. “The rest is history.”

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