It’s not intuitively obvious, but discarding DEI can result in even fewer medical professionals serving already underserved communities in rural Ohio. The Trump administration is doing its level best to eliminate DEI on the premise it fosters unlawful discrimination, but as Abraham Graber, Ph.D, points out, DEI promotes diversity and equity so as to achieve better outcomes, and that includes better outcomes in terms of getting more medical students interested in practicing medicine in rural Ohio.
There’s been a longstanding problem in rural Ohio suffering from inadequate healthcare. Some counties have just a handful of doctors. Some counties don’t have a single doctor or hospital. What if you live in, say, Vinton County, and you need an oncologist? Well, like they say in the mob, “Fuggetaboutit.” You’re pregnant and need prenatal care? Same thing.
Who picks up the slack in these counties? EMT crews, but their services are only a stopgap.
The absence of medical care for these communities means the people in these areas are not as healthy as those who live in metropolitan areas, and they have shorter life spans.
To get more medical professionals in rural Ohio, we need a concerted recruiting program. And that means recruiting from the counties that are underserved, because the people who would want to practice in those counties will most likely come from those counties and not from the large metropolitan areas.
And here’s the challenge. If kids in those counties don’t see doctors and don’t see their friends becoming doctors, they’ll never even think about becoming doctors.
And for those few who might aspire to practice medicine, they likely don’t have the same life experience or education as others and, thus, face barriers when tested and suffer from the negative stereotype many have about rural Americans.
As Dr. Graber points out, if we want to start getting students in rural Ohio interested in and practicing medicine, we have to start thinking about how we find these young people. Focusing on test scores alone won’t get us where we need to be. We need targeted recruiting, and that’s DEI.