Ensuring incoming cohorts of medical students better represent the diversity of Canada’s Indigenous communities – CMAJ

KEY POINTS

• Indigenous students from reserves, rural, and Northern communities continue to be under-represented in Canadian medical schools, which likely contributes substantially to ongoing health inequities in these communities.
• A combination of socioeconomic disadvantage, geographic barriers to pursuing prerequisite postsecondary education, and limited opportunities to gain early exposure to careers in health care likely contributes to this problem.
• Improving representation should start with adopting a distinctions-based approach to the recruitment of Indigenous students to medical schools and developing upstream recruitment interventions that support students longitudinally in the process of preparing to apply to medical school.
• Developing partnerships between key players in medical education will be crucial to supporting successful application of Indigenous students from communities in which there are simultaneously the most barriers to pursuing a career in medicine and yet perhaps the greatest need for Indigenous physicians.

It has become increasingly evident that First Nations people living on reserves and Indigenous people from rural and Northern communities have a substantially lower chance of getting into medical school in Canada than their urban counterparts. This often unappreciated disparity likely contributes to ongoing health inequities and may explain why there are so few Indigenous physicians currently practising in these communities.

Read More: https://www.cmaj.ca/content/196/16/E563