Dr. Maria Harsha Wusu
The specialty has been on the path to a racially diverse workforce over the past few decades. Since family medicine is a discipline where doctors look not just at individual patients, but also at the health of the community, some family physicians see working in their specialty as a way to integrate public health with medicine to curb health inequities.
Maria Harsha Wusu, MD, MSEd, is an example of such a family physician.
Dr. Wusu, who is Black and of Japanese descent, chose to practice family medicine to address health in communities of color “which we know in the United States experience health inequities due to structural racism,” she said in an interview.
“It’s a discipline where you look at the health of the entire family and the community and you really look at the environmental, the political, the historical factors that are influencing the health of the community,” explained Dr. Wusu, who is currently the director of health equity at Morehouse School of Medicine, Atlanta. Family physicians are not just asking: “Does a patient have hypertension?” but also whether a patient has access to healthy food, green space and other things.
While the field of family medicine is more diverse in the 21st century than it was at its beginning, Dr. Wusu, who completed her residency in 2016, still faced challenges to achieving her goal of helping communities of color. These specifically stemmed from a lack of diversity among the people in the places where she studied to become a doctor and family physician.
There were moments when Dr. Wusu felt isolated while in medical school and residency, because so few students and faculty members she saw looked like her.
Plus, studies have shown that a racially and ethnically diverse physician workforce is necessary to address health inequities. Research published in 2018 in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, for example, found that underrepresented physicians are more likely to practice in underserved areas than their White peers.
“I went to medical school at a historically White institution, and so there were very few people who identified as what we would say are underrepresented minorities in medicine,” Dr. Wusu explained. “There are issues with both implicit and explicit racism, which I think could be echoed by colleagues across the country that are additional challenges that I think medical students, particularly students of color, experience during what is an already kind of challenging time of medical school and the rigorous training of residency.”
Dr. Ada Stewart
Ada Stewart, MD, FAAFP, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, echoed Dr. Wusu’s medical school experience. Dr. Stewart, who finished her residency in 2003, said that, out of the 120 students in her graduating medical class, only 10 were Black.
Marginalized groups are still underrepresented in residences. According to data compiled by the Association of American Medical Colleges, only 9.3% of Black people, 10% of Latino, and 0.3% of Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders are residents in family medicine residency programs in 2019-2020. Meanwhile, White residents make up 50.8% of the residency program.
“We really need to do all that we can to increase diversity within our medical schools and residencies,” Dr. Stewart said.
In regards to gender, there has been an increasing number of women in the family medicine specialty. A 2021 study found that the proportion of female physicians in family medicine has grown from 33.9% 2010 to 41.9% in 2020.
“There’s still room for growth and we have to change the system and those structures that created these problems,” noted Dr. Stewart.