Background: The benefits of recruiting health care professionals with lived experiences which reflect the patients they serve are well known. Ethnic and racial concordance between physicians and patients has been shown to improve care for marginalized patients as well as decrease the implicit biases of their fellow colleagues. Systemic racism’s impact on physician representation necessitates intentional efforts in medical recruitment for equitable healthcare.
Purpose: Purpose:To highlight a tertiary care hospital’s success in significantly boosting URIM trainee numbers, despite low URIM faculty representation, to aid institutions facing similar challenges.
Description: Description:We employed the McKinsey 7-S change model (See Figure 1), which consists of ‘hard elements’ (structure, strategy, system) and ‘soft elements’ (shared values, style, staff, skills). Leveraging a librarian-mediated search, tracking previous years’ URIM applicants’ metrics, analyzing patient demographics, and reviewing institutional history formed our approach. Structuring recruitment efforts involved standardizing procedures across departments. Program leaders reviewed metrics from previous years, implemented holistic reviews, updated websites with DEI efforts, and engaged with URIM students at national conferences and HBCU medical schools. Educating interviewers to mitigate unconscious bias and foster comfortable discussions about the institution’s DEI efforts during interviews was also critical. Zoom sessions for applicants and post-match reviews aided sustained growth, achieving a 247% increase in URIM trainees over three years, consistently matching 23% URIM residents annually.
Conclusions: Conclusions:Utilizing the McKinsey 7-S model, our multifaceted approach significantly and sustainably increased URIM trainee recruitment in an academic medical center with limited URIM faculty. Next, piloting this approach in URIM faculty recruitment aims to further institutionalize diversity and inclusion efforts.
