The proportion of Black physicians in the healthcare workforce has only increased 4 percentage points in the last 120 years, according to a study published April 19 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles analyzed U.S. Census data from 1900 to 2018, which included information on 150,00 physicians. Of these, about 3,300 were Black male physicians and 1,600 were Black female physicians.
In 1900, about 1.3 percent of U.S. physicians were Black. This figure rose to 5.4 percent in 2018. Over this time period, the overall proportion of Black Americans in the U.S. rose slightly from 11.6 percent in 1900 to 12.8 percent in 2018.
The percentage of Black female physicians jumped 2.7 percentage points during the study period, but the proportion of Black male physicians remained mostly unchanged, researchers found.
"If medical leadership is serious about making the physician workforce more representative of the general population, much more effective policies need to be conceptualized and implemented," lead author Dan Ly, an assistant professor of medicine at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, said in a news release.
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