Slow Progress and Persistent Challenges for the Underrepresented Minority Family Physician

In the article, “Board certified family physician workforce: progress in racial and ethnic diversity,” the authors review the racial and ethnic background of physicians to document proportional growth over time as compared with 2017 United States Census data. In their analysis, they aggregated data provided by family medicine physicians at the time of application for their American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) certification examination. The years evaluated were from 2013 to 2017, and that timespan yielded a match of 66,542 board certified family physicians for the study. Results showed that the growth of the number of board certified family medicine black and Hispanic or Latino physicians lags behind other groups, as well as census defined numbers, 7.8% versus 13.3% for black physicians and 9.1% versus 17.8% for Hispanic or Latino physicians.1 Parity was seen with white physicians (61.2% vs 61.3%), and Asian physicians (21.8% vs 5.7%) were overrepresented as compared with their representation in the US population. Even though there has been an overall increase in physician numbers over the past 30 years, the numbers of black and Hispanic or Latino physicians has not kept the pace.

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