Health
Diversity in health care coming too slowly for some
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By AMELIA HAVANEC
Capital News Service
LANSING – Health experts urging more diversity in Michigan’s health care workforce may see graduation statistics from local universities as good news. In the 2013-2014 academic year, more than a quarter of medical school graduates from Wayne State University and the University of Michigan – 27 percent and 36 percent respectively – were minorities, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics’ Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Set. In that same year, according to the data, minority students constituted 37 percent of the graduating class at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Dentistry, up 68 percent from its preceding graduating class. “Our goal is to increase the students that come from these areas around our city to be able to train and then serve in the communities in which they come from,” said De’Andrea Matthews, the director of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at Wayne State University School of Medicine. “And that’s necessary to reduce health disparities that impact our overall health.”
Matthews stresses the importance of outreach and recruitment activities with not just students at the K-12 level, but also for undergraduate students across the country.